A Corpus-based Study Of Existential Sentences From The Perspective Of Construction Grammar

English existential sentence is one of the most common constructions in English.English existential construction is used to show ‘Something in some place’. Its usualstructure is ‘There+be+n.+adv. of place’. English Existential construction istraditionally studied from the perspective of Generated Grammar theory. Englishexistential has a large scope, on which the studies have obviously achieved a lot.From the perspective of prototypical, pragmatics, corpus-based study or starting fromcognitive linguistics, English existential construction has been studied systematicallyalready. All the studies above emphasized the position of there. However, studiestaking the whole existential structure as the research object are far from enough.English existential construction ‘there be’ is an argument structure with two argumentroles in which be is followed by a noun phrase.The construction structure of existential is ‘There(formal subject)+be+existence (logical subject)+location phrase. This thesis aims at exploring the status ofexistential construction, the structure of this construction, argument structure and itsvariation. On the basis of usage, the thesis will apply those five principles thatconstruction grammar theory insists to investigate the diachronic changes of argumentroles. Furthermore, it will apply boxes-within-boxes Diagrams, feature structureDiagram and Co-indexation to study the there be construction. This thesis will applyBritish National Corpus in exploring the process in which how the construction cameinto being. The corpus data, including the frequency change, form change andfunction change, gives a powerful support to the study. Existential constructionformed under the influence of construction coercion. Thus, this thesis falls into fivechapters.The first chapter states the English existential construction, including the matterfor which there is put at the beginning. Besides, this chapter will explain the corpusanalysis, such as the choice of the corpus, the acquirement of the data, in the end of this chapter, research purpose and the arrangement of the thesis. Chapter2is aliterature review of English existential construction both abroad and at home. Chapter3provides the theoretical foundation of the research; Chapter4is the analyzingchapter; it will use boxes-within-boxes Diagrams, feature structure Diagram andCo-indexation to explore the construction, investigating the relationship between theconstituents in the construction. Moreover, argument structure will be analyzed in thischapter with the help of methodology in construction grammar. Chapter4will alsocooperate with corpus data study to research the variation of there be construction, theformation of there be construction within different diachronic stages. Chapter5makesa conclusion about this research, including the significance of the existentialconstruction. It also gives suggestions for the future study.