A Contrastive Study Of Existential Sentences In Chinese And German Versions Of A Dream In Red Mansions

Existential sentence is a special sentence pattern in Chinese.Although,in German there is the almost practical unanimity with Chinese existential sentence,but it is very different in syntactic patterns and semantic representation from that in Chinese.A Dream in Red Mansions is one of the four major classical novels in China.It has been being paid much attention by domestic and foreign scholars due to its extremely high literary value and research value.There are a large number of different forms of existential sentences in A Dream in Red Mansions.From the perspective of contrastive linguistics,this paper adopts induction,statistics,description and other research methods to compares and summarizes the existential sentences of A Dream in Red Mansions in Chinese version(first eighty chapters by Cao Xueqin & Gao'E)and German version(first forty chapters translated by sinologist Rainer Schwarz).This paper makes a exhaustive collection of existential sentences in A Dream in Red Mansions,compare the expressions in German translation with Chinese.Beside that this study borrows the modern language theory to sort the existential sentences,and from the three levels of sentence structure,semantics and pragmatics,we describe and analyze all the existential sentences in detail.In order to find out the grammatical features of Chinese existential sentences and the characteristics and corresponding rules of German corresponding sentence patterns of existential sentences in A Dream in Red Mansions.It will provide some help for second language teaching and translation of literary works.The paper consists of seven parts: the first part is the introduction,which mainly introduces the research results,research methods,research objects and corpus sources.The second part is to re-establish the definition,standard and classification of the existential sentence in A Dream in Red Mansions based on classification results of Chinese and German existential sentences.Starting from the composition of sentence components,the existential sentences can be divided into two categories: existential sentence with complete sentence composition and incomplete sentence composition.Then according to the semantic features we sort them as existential sentence and fugitive sentence.The third part is the comparative description and analysis of complete existential sentences in A Dream in Red Mansions and corresponding sentences in German.It alsomentions that German sentences appear to be complex and diverse in form because of its normative framework in grammar.The forth part analyzes and classifies incomplete existential sentences in A Dream in Red Mansions.German is a systematic language and generally,components have to be in certain places despite their meanings in sentences while the expressions of Chinese are of great difference.The fifth part focuses on the descriptive analysis of existential sentences in A Dream in Red Mansions and that in modern Chinese.This kind of sentence is indifferent from �V-ing� and �V-ed� sentences in German.It is unique in Chinese existential sentences.The sixth part makes a comparative analysis on the sentence structure,predicate verb,semantic feature,discourse function and word between the Chinese existential sentences and German express �existential� sentences.Then,we conduct a summary and inductive.The last part summarizes the main purpose of this thesis and discusses the similarities and differences of features and expressions of existential sentences between two languages.It also states the originality of the study and the direction of further research.