A Comparative Study of English and Chinese Existential Sentences Based on Corpus

Abstract

Existential sentence as a special syntax and semantic structure has been widely used by people. As the two languages with the largest number of speakers in the world, it is important and necessary to explore the internal structure of Chinese and English existential sentences. This study uses corpora to compare Chinese and English existential sentences and explore the reasons why the two kinds of existential sentences are so different. It’s found that they have similar syntactic structure. However, for the preverb component, English existential sentences usually have “there” in the preverb component. Chinese existential sentences have many forms of preverb components. For the noun phrases, the noun phrases are indefinite in both kinds of existential sentences. But the sentences type with a postpositive appositive clause is only seen in Chinese existential sentences. For the word order, in English existential sentences, position of the locative phrase (LP) is flexible, in Chinese existential sentences, however, the LP is fixed at beginning of the sentence. For the semantic, the semantic meaning and function of English and Chinese are similar, because they both represent the appearance, existence or disappearance and the locative adverbial in English existential sentences is equivalent to the existential regional words in Chinese. But there are more existential verbs in Chinese, with more complicated semantic types, and the distribution of the existential sentences they form is very extensive. The differences are explained from three aspects: ethic thinking pattens, ethic culture and languages themselves. These findings supplement the understanding of Chinese and English existential sentences and shed light on later studies should consider more corpora to study existential sentences.