A Contrastive Study Of There Be Existential Clause In Fictional Register And Academic Register

In the theoretical framework of Functional Linguistics,this thesis explores the differences of there be existential clause in fictional and academic register from the aspect of form,meaning and function.These three aspects are interrelated and complementary to each other.The thesis will be discussed from the triangle perspective:from above,from below and from around.So far,there is no scholar investigating the characteristics of there be existential clause in a specific register.The author chooses there be existential clauses in fictional register and academic register as research object to study the differences of form,meaning and function.There are 1000 existential clauses being studied with each register covering 500 examples and all examples in this thesis are selected from Corpus of Contemporary American English(COCA).The data processing is done by manual annotation,and the statistic is collected by corpus tool AntConc.Existential clause is a syntactic structure used by human beings to construe whether something exists or not.It is universal.In principle,any phenomena in the world,such as people,objects,mechanisms or abstract concepts,can be coded into things,even activities or events,can be expressed through existential structures.The congruent expression of existential clause is guided by unstressed there to express the existence of an entity in the real world,while metaphorical expression of existential clause expresses events,activities and abstract spiritual world.The former is the unmarked usage of existential clause,while the latter is the marked usage of existential clause.With the help of abundant examples,this thesis probes into existential clauses in fictional and academic register.It is found that existential clauses in fictional register generally use congruent expressions to express existential meaning,while existential clauses in academic register tend to use metaphorical expressions to construct other meanings.From the aspect of form,this thesis mainly examines the differences of existential verbs be,Existent,non-finite element and circumstantial element of existential clauses in fictional and academic registers.The author finds that there are so much differences.For example,in academic register,the most typical tense is present tense,and there is is the most frequently used;Existents in fictional register are usually concrete and perceptible,while those in the academic register are usually abstract and imperceptible;the non-finite elements in the fictional register tend to be "dynamic" and express happening meaning,while the non-finite elements in the academic register tend to be "static" and express existential meaning;The circumstantial elements in fictional register usually refer to a specific place,which is closely related to the plot of the story;while the circumstantial elements in the academic register generally refer to an abstract aspect,which is invisible and intangible,and related to the point to be demonstrated in that paper.From the aspect of meaning,existential clause is named after "existence" and its basic usage is to express whether something exists or not.And it is the unmarked usage of existential process in transitivity.The marked usage of existential process is to encode and construe other processes and express other transitive meaning instead of existential meaning.The author finds that most existential clauses in fictional register express existential meanings,some of which express other transitive meanings such as material,mental,verbal and behavioral meanings;while most existential clauses in the academic register express abstract existential meanings,which in fact are metaphorical expressions of relational processes.From the aspect of function,the thesis mainly focuses on discourse function.The existential enhanced theme construction in fictional register has six functions-introducing new topic/participant,setting situation,making a comparison,highlight,expressing emotion and evaluating.That in academic register has six functions-providing evidence/example/explanation/reason to prove/argue/deny something,putting forward issues to be discussed,making a comparison,presenting finding/conclusion/implication/summary,giving accurate and specific information,and showing attitude.In fictional register,the most typical function of existential clauses is to introduce a new information that has never appeared before.This new information often pushes the story forward,and the next few clauses are usually closely related to this new information.In academic register,existential clauses are usually used to further explain or argue the arguments put forward in the preceding text,and to present new evidence or refutation,such as there is evidence/opposition,etc.In terms of"tightness" and "depth"with the following text,the existential clauses in academic register may not be as closely related as those in fictional register,but the coverage of the topic may be wider.In a word,there be existential clauses in fictional and academic register differ a lot from each other in the three aspects of form,meaning and function.The main contribution of this thesis is to integrate register as an important parameter into the syntactic study and there are indeed some new findings.At the same time,there are also many shortcomings.The main shortcomings are as follows:firstly,there are only two registers included in the study,and if possible subsequent studies can take newspapers,spoken and other' registers into consideration;secondly,if the location of existential clauses in different registers can be pointed out,it will be helpful for further and more detailed research.For example,whether existential clauses in academic register have different meanings and functions in the part of introduction,body or conclusion can be probed.