A Functional Syntactico-semantic Analysis Of Chinese Existential Clauses

Chinese existential clause is a special type of clause in Chinese. Since the publication of the first Chinese grammar book Ma Shi Wen Tong(“Ma’s Understanding of Language”) in 1898, Chinese existential clauses(CECs) have caught the attention of many scholars in China. Even though many scholars have studied CECs from different perspectives, there are still disputes over the syntactic and semantic analyses of CECs among the scholars due to their different theoretical backgrounds.This thesis studies CECs that present the existence of entities, not only the state of existence but also the appearance and disappearance of entities. Based on the Systemic Functional Grammar, the present study adopts both descriptive and qualitative methods to explore the syntactic and semantic features of CECs. Through the syntactic analysis of CECs, the present study ascertains the syntactic roles of different constituents in the clause and resolves the long-existing disputes over the Subject of CECs. Additionally, from the perspective of the Cardiff model of Systemic Functional Grammar, this thesis also probes the semantic analysis in terms of the transitivity analysis, thematic structure and information organization to illustrate the semantic features of the initial elements, the Chinese existential verbs and the postverbal constituents of CECs. According to the syntactico-semantic features, the thematic system of CECs and the systemic classification of Chinese existential verbs are established in this thesis.Therefore, through the syntactico-semantic analysis of CECs, this thesis, to some extent, complements the study of existential clauses and helps resolve some disputes over CECs from the perspective of Systemic Functional Grammar. Moreover, it is hoped that it will contribute to the systemic-functional study of Chinese as well as to the teaching and learning of Chinese as a foreign language.