A Comparative Study Of The Coercive Features In Chinese “YOU” Constructions And English There-constructions

As one typical construction pattern expressing the concept of “existence”,the Chinese “YOU” construction is not only realized as one subtype of existential constructions in Chinese in consideration of its various semantic meanings like“possession” and “listing” except “existence”,but also analyzed as an independent construction type itself with different subtypes of construction.By contrast,the construction type used to express the concept of “existence” in English is the There-construction which similarly expresses other semantic meanings like “listing”.In addition,English There-construction expressing “existence” is also marked with other constructive meaning types,and “there” itself also expresses the concept of “location”used to introduce a concrete referent from the situational context.English There-constructions cited and analyzed in the thesis mainly include the existential type,namely existential There-construction.However,there are distinctive features between Chinese “YOU” constructions and English existential There-constructions which are commonly discussed and compared for expressing the concept of existence.These features will be listed and analyzed in this thesis in detail.It can be summarized that the two construction types lie in the relation of two intersecting circles metaphorically with the meaning of “existence” as the interaction part and other meaning types expressed by them respectively as the rest part,which,to some extent,shows semantic meanings and sentence structures are the study focus.For the second language learners,whether their native language is Chinese or English,it is harder for them to have a clear understanding of Chinese “YOU”constructions and English There-constructions for the semantic complexity with their corresponding syntactic structures.Therefore,the comparative study on their features ofclassification in meanings and structures combined which not only reflects differences and similarities between English and Chinese in expressing the same semantic concept,but the distinguished features in expressing other semantic concepts at the same time,is necessary in order to have a better understanding of the concept of existence both in English and Chinese.Many former studies on the two construction types focus more on the separate features of meaning and sentence structure,or only compare the semantic type of existence with the combination of other existential construction types.Few studies focus on the features of combined meaning and sentence structure based on the premise of the two construction types being analyzed as an independent one respectively.This thesis aims to distinguish “YOU” construction and There-construction by exploring an alternative way of classification with the combination of previous and separated studies on their sentence structures and meanings respectively.It tries to summarize construction categories of the two construction types with re-classified meanings and corresponding structures combined,and explore the differences and similarities between the two construction types in semantic features and sentence structures combined together.The result of the direct combination of sentence structures and meanings explored in this thesis shows that there exists the polysemy between semantic and structural poles.However,it could be eliminated by constructional classification scheme of form and meaning pairing.There have been a lot of articles about constructive features of existential There-constructions.There are a relatively small number of studies focusing on Chinese “YOU” constructions.This thesis attempts to summarize and compare the constructive systems of Chinese “YOU” constructions and existential There-constructions based on features of forms and meanings in different constructions,and to further analyze the inner mechanism of their corresponding sorting way based on the theory of Cognitive Construction Grammar by comparing the differences and similarities in coercive features(construction coercion,lexical coercion and aspectual coercion)in constructions.It is found that there are eight types of “YOU” constructions,but only one type of existential There-construction with several variants of construction.The innermechanism that brings about the difference in constructive classification for the two construction types lies in their coercive features in which Chinese “YOU” constructions are classified as a result of lexical coercion,while existential There-construction with various construction variants is explored as a result of construction coercion.Existential There-construction coerces other verbs besides the existential type into this construction,which leads to various existential There-construction variants rather than new construction types.