A Study On The Construal Mechanism Of English Existential Sentences

As the most common English expression of existence, Existential Sentence (ES) has a complex and special sentence structure with inverted word order and grammaticalized THERE. According to Langacker, grammar is meaningful. Different grammatical structures convey different information. Therefore, this type of sentence structure would have its own characteristics and reveal the particularity of human’s cognition on existence.This paper mainly deals with the construal mechanism of English existential sentence. It reveals the construal mechanism of existence for hearers through analysis of some components of ES. The research has found that the construal mechanism of the prototypical ES may follow the following three steps: the construal of existence, the elaboration of the existent and its localization.The first step is realized by the combination of THERE and BE. The front position of the word THERE represents the existential meaning and BE elaborates the continuity of state and implies some characteristics of the existent, which can be also called the trajector (TR). The second step is that the construal of existence provides an elaboration site, which is corresponded by its profiling existent. The final step is localization which means that the trajector in PP corresponds to the existent or the trajector in ES and a reference in PP makes a correspondence to the elaboration site of landmark (LM) in ES.Then the paper has discussed characteristics of ES such as attention shift, existential presupposition of localization, bounding of nominal predications, the conceptualization of trajectors and the entitization of landmarks and prototypical tense and aspect of ES.Lastly, several types of non-prototypical existential sentences have been analyzed such as ES with other verbs except BE verbs, ES with definitiveness effect, non-extended ES and here-constructions. Different sentence structures achieve different conversational effects and maintain different focus of attention. As for ES with other verbs, it makes emphasis on actions and its agents. ES with definitiveness effect concentrates on the sense of existence and its existent, usually used as example-presenting. Non-extended ES realizes just the first two steps of the construal mechanism. In most cases, the use of the definitiveness effect or other verbs is based on such a sentence structure. Finally, here-construction can also be regarded as non-prototypical existential sentence, for HERE is not completely taken off its deictic meaning and functions at the same time as existential THERE and PP.