Cognitive Interpretation Of English Existential Sentence

Movement is the fundamental property of matter. A moving matter exists in a certain time and space. Existential sentence is used to describe the existence, appearance and disappearance of a matter in the domain of time and space. Though a universal phenomenon in almost every language in the world, existential sentence, because of its particular structure, has been the research focus for western and domestic linguistic scholars. Under the framework of cognitive linguistics, figure-ground theory, grammaticalization and iconicity are applied to making a cognitive interpretation of the problems in English existential sentence.The study of English existential sentence from figure-ground theory shows that the marked form of existential sentence, which is widely accepted among linguistic scholars, is unacceptable within the framework of figure-ground theory. In this sense, the thesis is more like the cognitive study of there-structure than the study of English existential sentence. Definiteness restriction in existential sentence can also be interpreted by figure-ground theory:existential entity, as the figure, has to be "new knowledge", so it shouldn’t be definite nouns.There at the start of the sentence is the result of grammaticalization. Because of the uni-directionality of grammaticalization, there, together with its following verb, is more likely to be taken as a fixed combination. With the development of grammaticalization, the variants of existential sentence can also be explained as the grammaticalization of existential verb and existential entity.Iconicity can also be applied to the interpretation of English existential sentence. Studies show that subject-predicate consistency is the common function of quantitative iconicity, markedness iconicity and distance iconicity. Subject-predicate inconsistency may result from the switch of perspectives and predicate’s agreement with grammatical subject-there in person and number.