A Cognitive Study Of Existential Sentences In English And Chinese

This thesis attempts to analyze existential sentences in English and Chinese froma cognitive perspective, with a view to exploring their characteristics, translation aswell as their similarities and the differences. What the study finds are as follows:Firstly, existential there is different from deictic there in the aspects ofsubjecthood, negatability, embeddability and alteration with here. Existential therehas an abstract locative meaning, it is a grammaticalized word deriving from theadverb, indicating the location, and playing the function of pointing to what is comingnext. It also serves as an introductory word like a starter to activate language users’experiential understanding of the sentence uttered. Secondly, from the perspective offigure-ground segregation, the structure of English existential sentences mainlyfollows the order of Figure–Ground with certain specific exceptions, which fits wellinto English people’s cognition of world, that is, There (starter)+V(expressingexistence, appearance and disappearance)+Nominals (Figure, a new entity)+Prepositional phrases (Ground, designated by phrases of space or time). When itcomes to Chinese existential sentences, the structure of which is of the typical Ground–Figure one, which also fits well into Chinese people’s cognition of expressingsomething exists in some place, that is, NP1（Location）(Ground)+VP (expressingdifferent statements of existing)+NP2（entity）(Figure, a new entity). The word order ofChinese existential constructions is rather fixed, which is quite different from that ofEnglish existential constructions. Thirdly, it is commonly accepted that onlyindefinite post-verbal nominal phrases can occur freely and normally in Englishexistential sentences, i.e. the definiteness restriction. However, the purpose of thespeaker’s using there-constructions is to activate the hearer’s attention of theexistence of an entity in certain frame of space or time if the hearer is supposed by thespeaker to be unaware of the entity in the current discourse space (CDS, a mentalspace comprising everything presumed to be shared by the speaker and hearer as thebasis for discourse at a given moment). Therefore, CDS is important to the understanding of the reason for applying the definite noun phrases and it is the humancognition of the world that the entity indicated by NPs is either new in the CDS or inthe previous frames of space or time. Fourthly, the differences betweenthere-be-existentials and have-existentials are as follows: Have-existentials mainlyindicate kinship, part-whole and ownership relation while there-be-existentials paymore attention to the existence of the entity. From the perspective of Langacker’ssubjectification, the subjects in have-existentials function as a spatial reference pointfor locating the object. Fifthly, English and Chinese belong to different languagefamilies, but they share many similarities when it comes to the discussion ofexistential sentences, even though they have more distinguished differences. Thus, theapplication of conceptual integration theory is of great necessity to the translation ofexistential sentences. From cognitive perspective, the cultural differences, differentways of thinking and different organizations of the language should be taken intoconsideration. We should not blindly translate the English existential sentences intothe conventional way, as “some place exists something or somebody” and the Chineseexistential sentences as There-be-constructions. Therefore, a case-to-case studyshould be made.