A BNC-based Study Of Existential-There Construction

Recent years have witnessed increasing attention to the existential-there sentence.The linguistic academics have yielded fruitful academic results,which mainly include the classifications of existential verbs in the existential-there sentence and corpus-based studies of the existential-there sentence.As a construction,the corresponding prototypical meaning of the existential-there sentence is that there is someone or something in a place.Although the theoretical bases and approaches of the existential-there sentence have undertaken many changes,we find that most of the previous studies confine themselves to the existential-there sentence and the classifications of existential verbs,paying more attention to the standard form of Existential-There Construction.While the study of semantic features of existential verbs from the perspective of lexical forms,the dynamic interaction between Existential-There Construction and existential verbs and text domain distributions still leaves some space for investigation.With reference to Levin,Jin and Tian's proposed categorization of the existential verbs and Gries' collostructional analysis,this article aims to reveal the semantic meanings and the text domain distributions of Existential-There Construction in BNC(British National Corpus).The study has found that 1)semantic categories of the existential verbs have different compatibilities with Existential-There Construction,which confirms verbs of existence occupying the center position of category,posing typical characteristic in cognition;2)Through the comparison between the semantic categories of the existential verbs and lemmatization,the study proves the necessity of studying semantic compatibilities between lexical forms of the existential verbs and Existential-There Construction;3)Existential-There Construction has its preference on lexical forms of the existential verbs and text domains.The study can cast light on the study of construction and pragmatic functions,enriching the previous studies on the usage characteristics of Existential-There Construction,providing certain enlightenment and pedagogical implications on English writing and teaching.