Existential Structure To Generate Contrast

In both English and Chinese, the idiosyncrasies in the semantic properties and syntactic structure of existential structures (ES) have long been noticed and intensely discussed. This thesis intends to compare the semantic and syntactic properties of English and Chinese existential structures, on which explain the generation of English and Chinese existential structures in the MP framework.On the basis of analysis of the semantic properties and syntactic structure of English and Chinese existential structures, this thesis divides the English and Chinese existential structures into two types: the general structure and the special structure. Through the comparison among the features of the sentential components, it can be found that all the predicates of English and Chinese existential structures are unaccusative verbs, which can be divided into three kinds: the pure existential verbs, the pure unaccusative verbs and the quasi-unaccusative verbs. It also can be founded that there exist three kinds of situations for the surface subject of English and Chinese existential structures; the definiteness effect (DE) is the basic semantic feature of the deep subject, and the deep subject exhibits DE in the different degree. When LP is the locative adverbial in both English and Chinese existential structures, its form has changed. After the comparison of the above features, this thesis takes one basic generational structure to illustrate the generation of English and Chinese existential structures one by one, and finally a conclusion is made that both English and Chinese existential structures have the similar generation procedure, the difference is that during the process of the generation the different parameters lead to the divergence of the surface structures of the two languages.However language is a very complicated phenomenon. After analyzing the semantic properties, syntactic structure and the generation of English and Chinese existential structures, some questions are left for further analysis.