A Research On The Presence And Absence Of The Preposition Zai In The Existential Sentence

The article is a research on the presence and absence of the preposition zai in the existential of modern Chinese based on the corpus.In this research,we find zai has a contact with both section A and section B of the existential sentence.The factors influenceing on the occurrence of the preposition zai is complicated.In syntax, we proves that1)the low-frequency use of zai is connected with the development of the existential;2)the presence or absence of zai is restricted by the syntactic rules of modern Chinese.For example,the preposition zai can not disappear if there is the adverb jiu before the section A because of the rules. In semantics,we find that on one hand,the degree of the spatial semantic expressed by section A restricts the occurrence of zai.In our research,we find the spatial semantic consists of three parts,the location,the direction and the position in the section A.On the other hand, the constuction of the existential make the absence of zai possible.In pragmatics,we identify that the presence or absence of preposition zai is decided by the function and the need of the existential in the paragraphs.The function of the existential is including the topic function, the connection and the transition,at the same time we find there are two reasons to use the existential in communication,one is the need of the coherence,the other is the need of cognitive highlight.In addiction,we found a language library including almost30languages to research the situation of the relator in the existential,and we proves that the presence or absence of the relator is related with two kinds of tendency in language universals:1)how to express the spaces and locatives,one is using the semantic of the noun or substantive,the other is using the function of the relator;2) how the existential gives the spatial components the syntactic status,one way is making the spatial component to be the subject of a sentence,another way is making the spatial component to be the modifiers.All the research identify the constuction of the existential is the key factor which restricts the the presence and absence of the preposition zai.