The Syntax Of English And Chinese Existential Constructions

Existential Constructions are a special type of sentence pattern that indicates the existence?or nonexistence?of an entity or event.English Existential Constructions?EECs?involve two sentence patterns,there-existentials and Locative Inversions?LIs?,while Chinese Existential Constructions?CECs?involve one pattern LIs.Syntactic studies on EECs and CECs put forward proposals on agreement and case assignment in there-existentials,the subject identification in LIs,and the structural relationship between there-existentials and LIs.But controversies still remain over these issues.Previous studies usually apply the analysis of the derivation of EECs to that of CECs.Although this accords with Universal Grammar,it is probably over-generalized when the syntactic and semantic disparities between EECs and CECs are overlooked.In order to resolve the pendent issues mentioned above and to account for the derivation of EECs and CECs within the framework of generative grammar,this thesis compares EECs and CECs by analyzing their constituents:the expletive there in there-existentials,the locative phrase and the existential verb in EECs and CECs.The major findings of this thesis are as follows.There are two differences between EECs and CECs.One difference is that there-existentials have an expletive there.According to Jenset?s?2013?diachronic corpus-based study,we learn that there deviates from the locative adverbial there and develops into an existential marker,which we assume is an abstract deictic form with the interpretation“in the universe”.The other difference is the formation of locative phrases.English locatives are categorized as PP,whereas Chinese locatives are diversely presented as NP,LP,pP or PP.The similarity between EECs and CECs is that both English and Chinese existential verbs have unaccusative properties,unable to assign a theta role to their external argument and to assign accusative case to their internal argument.They bear the same thematic and structural relation with the locative phrase and the postverbal NP.Thematically,the existential verb assigns a theme role to the postverbal NP and a location role to the locative phrase.Structurally,the existential verb has a complex structure with an inner VP embedded within an outer v_EXP shell.The inner VP is headed by the lexical unaccusative verb V while the outer v _EXP is headed by an existential light verb v _EX.Within the VP,the lexical verb has an optional location argument originating in[Spec,VP]and an obligatory theme argument originating in the complement position of V.Within the v _EXP,the light verb v_EXX with strong features always triggers the adjunction of the lexical verb.Then this thesis investigates the syntactic derivation of EECs and CECs.Given the subject status of there and the topic-comment information structure in LIs,we account for the derivation of there-existentials and LIs respectively.In the derivation of there-existentials,there originates in[Spec,IP]as subject and it is assigned nominative case by Infl.Within v_EXP,the locative phrase stays in situ in[Spec,VP]while the postverbal NP moves to[Spec,v_EXP]to satisfy the EPP feature of the functional head v_EX.In the derivation of LIs,the locative phrase proceeds to the left-peripheral position to satisfy the Topic Criterion while the postverbal NP stays in situ in the complement position of V.Despite the above differences,the same rules apply in the agreement relation between Infl and postverbal NP,as well as the postverbal NP?s case assignment in the derivation of EECs and CECs.Under William?s?1994?“relativized head”hypothesis,the postverbal NP is a relativized head of V?.So its phi-features can percolate upward to V?and finally to Infl.Following Sobin?s?2014?proposal that the postverbal NPs in EECs are in a default position where pronominal NPs bear prechecked case feature and full NPs lack case feature,we assume that the postverbal NPs in CECs,like full NPs in EECs,are in a default position and lack case feature.Thus all the postverbal NPs are exempt from case assignment.The above analysis provides an asymmetric account for the derivation of there-existentials and English and Chinese LIs.This account attempts to explain case assignment and agreement in EECs and CECs,as well as the structural relationship between EECs and CECs.But there are still other linguistic phenomena concerning EECs and CECs undiscussed.Therefore,the further study is needed to justify the validity of the present analysis.