| The study of English existential sentences has been one of the topics in linguisticresearch at home and abroad. As a common and special language phenomenon, anexistential sentence expresses the existence of thing or human in a certain place.Because of its typical structure and grammatical features, the existential sentence isregarded as key points and difficult points both in the theoretical study and inteaching practice. Many linguists have made important contribution to the study ofEnglish existential sentences. However, with the further development of linguistics,the study of meaning has become the mainstream of language study. People not onlypay attention to the study of linguistic form and structure, but regard the study oflinguistic meaning as the key point, and explore the process of construction. Theselinguists’ theories cannot give a good explanation for the people to understand theprocess of existential sentences while linguistics theories can show the real-timeconstruction process of meaning. So people can make further understand theessential characteristics of existential sentences.The author aims to put forward a new research perspective to study Englishexistential sentence on the basis of many relevant researches in domestic andoverseas. Meanwhile the author tries to combine related theories in cognitivelinguistics as the theoretical framework to explore English existential sentence anddiscuss a series of problems about its structure, subject-predicate agreement,direction, and definiteness. This study mainly includes four parts: usingtrajector/landmark and image schema in cognitive linguistics to explore the structuralcharacteristics of English existential sentence and the conversion from source-path-goal to container schema; using quantitative iconicity&markedness iconicity andbounded/unbounded region to analyze the subject-predicate agreement of Englishexistential sentences, and the subject-predicate disagreement involves the perspective conversion of cognitive domains of quality space and physical space; using thetheory of conceptualization to study the direction of English existential sentence;using the theories of mental contact and search domain to study the indefinitenessand definiteness of EES.All the corpora in the dissertation are mainly from Corpus of ContemporaryAmerican English (COCA) and they are authentic and representative. In early studies,the sample sentences for reference are selected from letters, magazines, novels andnewspapers, so the selected language data is unsystematical and chaotic. The data inthis dissertation is selected very carefully in view of their limitations. Most examplesof EES are selected from the COCA. The Corpus of Contemporary American Englishincludes more than450million words of text and the data is updated regularly.Besides, the COCA contains comprehensive genres which have equal distribution ofspoken, fiction, magazine, newspaper and academic. In order to get a perfectlyanalysis of English existential sentences, the dissertation chooses a portion(600) ofEnglish existential sentences from three genres in COCA, including fiction(200),spoken(200) and academic texts(200). At the same time, this dissertation also quotessome instances from other texts and created by the author.The core of this paper is to study the existential sentence within the scope of naturallanguage. With some collected examples, this dissertation tries to define Englishexistential sentence by means of qualitative research which is an introspectiveanalysis method based on the selected data. And this dissertation attempts to exploreand analyze the characteristics of the existential sentences by natural observation.This study shows the characteristics of English existential sentence and the processof meaning construction vividly. It enables people to understand the process ofinterpretation. There is certain reference significance for people to master and useEnglish existential sentence in the teaching practice. |
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