A Phase-based Approach To The Derivation Of Chinese Existential Sentences

Existential sentence is a special construction with cross-language properties, whose subordinate sentence pattern consists of existence sentence and fugitive sentence. Linguistic scholars both at home and abroad have made an in-depth study of relevant issues of English existential sentences (EES) and achieved great success. The study of Chinese existential sentences (CES) has also long been the hot issue which catches linguistic scholars’ attention. Through the literature review of studies of Chinese existential sentences we find that most of them are done within the framework of GB theory and these studies mainly include the following issues:<1> the generative mechanism of existential sentences in mandarin Chinese;<2> the grammatical status of the locative NP in Chinese existential sentences (or the identification of subject);<3> the nature of existential verbs, or the unaccusativity of existential verbs;<4> the case of the postverbal NP and its definiteness effect. Though lots of generative linguistic scholars have studied and discussed the above issues from different perspectives, agreement towards those issues still cannot be reached. And we could not make sure whose view is right or wrong.As is well known, generative linguistics is a discipline which keeps developing. From GB to MP, and the Phase theory put forward by Chomsky in recent years (1999,2001,2005,2008), we find that generative linguistics insists on making the computation of human being’s language faculty accordant with the laws of computation of organism in pursuit of natural "Economy principle", which is advocated by Chomsky and his followers and serves as the supreme constraint on syntactic computation. Phase theory, an entirely new theory developed within the framework of MP, adheres to the guiding principle---"Simplicity and Elegance" and maximally simplifies syntactic computation to its minimum. Based on the re-definition and re-classification to Chinese existential sentences, this paper attempts to explore the principled derivation of Chinese existential sentences within the framework of Phase theory and to provide an alternative solution to the pending problems of Chinese existential sentences. This paper argues that Chinese existential sentence belongs to pro-drop language, which means it doesn’t have any subjects in the deep structure, and the locative NP in Chinese existential sentence functions as an adverbial topic. This paper also accepts Pan’s (1996)"Agent Deletion""Passivization Operation" and Tian’s (2008)"Agentthemetiveation" to deal with the transitive verbs and unergative verbs in existential structure respectively, which once again proves the unaccusativity of existential verbs. As to the case of the postverbal NP,"Feature Valuation" and "Feature Deletion" are adopted to deal with this matter.