An Inquiry into Existential Constructions

نویسندگان

Guangjun Yang

Qilin Tian

چکیده

Existential constructions play an important role in the development of Generative Grammar. Their special natures urge linguists to pay painstaking effort to give them a unified account. At first we have a brief review of the relevant study of these constructions and examine their strong points and weakness. On the basis of their study, we assume that in existential constructions of SVO languages Pr has a [Loc] feature, and its obligatory [EPP] feature must be deleted by an element matching with this feature, that is, a locative expression. Owing to the special property of locative word, locative phrase has an interpretable feature and preposition in the locative phrase turns out to be a case marker rather than the common case-checking one. And Chinese does have null expletive there, but its distribution is subject to some constraints which can be summarized into this rule: the further the nature of existential verb is away from you (have), a morphological realization of Pr in existential constructions, the lower the possibility of null expletive’ appearance in Chinese existential constructions, provided that there is no locative noun phrase in the lexicon. With these assumptions proved tenable, we can not only offer a unified account of English and Chinese existential constructions, but also solve a lot of tough issues and longlasting controversies concerning Chinese existential constructions.

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