Empirical Study Of Teaching "There-"Construction

The conception of existence is a basic one first equipped with human being. ExistentialSentences, as the presentation of existence, is bound to be the basic form for human’sexpressing. Existential Sentence, as a universal language phenomenon, is an important topicin linguistics studies, owing to its complexity and peculiarity, such as unaccusativity of theexistential verb, the role and function of “there” and agreement. So it is doubtless thatExistential Sentence is a hotly-discussed and incomprehensible sentence pattern, of which theapplication mistakes are easily made by most of the students.Nowadays, lots of researches on EES have been conducted at home and abroad.Structural linguists just gave a descriptive interpretation of the definition, the classification,the structure and the transformation of Existential Sentence, without probing into the deepmotivations behind language. Functional linguists put heavy emphasis on external factors indiscourse and communization, failing to explain the importance of language itself. As togenerative linguists, the classic analysis of Existential Sentence is there-insertion analysis ofwhich exists obvious defects (Langacker1991:352; Bach1980). Comparatively speaking, theseries of problems of Existential Sentence could have a better understanding from thecognitive perspective.The current cognitive researches on EES are just restricted to the theoretical perspective,few of which involve the concrete studies on teaching instruction. Traditional grammaticalteaching instruction just puts too much attention to grammatical rules, rather than themotivation of grammatical phenomenon, and also concentrates on the contents in terms ofsurface forms without deep studies on logical language mechanism. This grammaticalteaching instruction is not able to meet the students’ curiosities and is not advantageous tocultivate learners’ logical thought ability to solve problems. Based on the current studies andteaching situations, this thesis attempts to combine the cognitive theories with teachingpractice by the means of qualitative and quantitative study. Then great effort is made to tryanswering two questions about EES. One is the difference between the traditional andcognitive grammar instruction under the framework of related cognitive theories. The other isthat what is the positive and practical influence on English Existential Sentences learning forChinese students from the cognitive perspective. Research results reveal that the experimental study based on cognitive linguistics could remedy the insufficient aspects of Chinese-Englishgrammatical teaching and it will be of great referential value to teaching theories, secondlanguage acquisition, and psycholinguistics and so on, which can also make contributions toimproving the English educational level. This thesis is intended to reflect and verify thelinguistics theories in the specific teaching practice, aiming to appeal more attention to makea complementary combination of linguistics theory and language teaching practice. As asaying goes,“Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach him how to fish and youfeed him for a lifetime”. As far as language teachers are concerned, they need to master thelinguistic theories, update teaching concepts, and keep pace with the times and spare no effortto cultivate the new area compound, high-quality foreign language talents.This thesis is only a tentative attempt while there are still lots of issues of EnglishExistential Sentences worth studying and exploring, such as the derivation progress of“There-” construction, the role and function of “there”, the cognitive motivation of “There-”construction.