An Event-construal Perspective To Mandarin Existential Construction

Semantically,existential construction expresses the meaning of "someone or something exists somewhere".Syntactically,it exhibits a marked word order where a locative NP occupies the sentence initial position and a NP occurs post-verbally.Its structural particularity has received extensive attention from scholars,and led to a series of research topics.This study concentrates on three controversial issues pertaining to EC,including:(1)whether the structure of EC is base-generated or derived from its non-inverted counterpart;(2)how we should constrain verbs in EC;(3)what roles the aspectual maker-le and-zhe play and why they are interchangeable.The study is based on Goldberg’s Construction Grammar.Given the problems existing in this theory,an event-construal based view on Construction Grammar is proposed.Through reflecting on the relation between verbs and events,and the relation between verbs and argument construction structures,this view redefines the nature of the interaction between verbs and ASCs.That is,a verb designates an abstract event that has multiple construal potential while an ASC encodes recurrent semantic relations among events.When a verb integrates with an ASC,the ASC imposes a special construal on the abstract event evoked by the verb to denote a specific event.However,not all events can be construed in the way required by ASCs.Thus,ASCs are partially rather than fully productive.The integration between verbs and ASCs should consider the semantic compatibility between them,as well as the constraints from specific verbs and ASCs.From an event-construal perspective to the interaction between verbs and ASCs,the study analyzes the three issues of EC and draws the following conclusions:First,EC instantiates Ground-before-figure gestalt,reflecting two dimensions of event construal,namely focusing and perspective.Compared with its non-inverted counterpart,EC enables the speaker to locate the figure in a cognitively more efficient way by first introducing the easy-to-recognize ground.Thus,from the perspective of cognitive efficiency,the study opposes the derivational analysis of EC.Second,existential verbs establish three relations with EC,including elaboration,force dynamics(means)and precondition,each of which corresponds to one generally defined verbal class,namely,verbs of spatial containment,verbs of manner of existence and verbs of "the termination of an action as the initiation of existence".It is argued that only when verbs belong to one of the three categories are they allowed to enter EC.This finding has shed light on how to characterize verbs in a construction.Since whether a verb can enter a construction or not is not decided by the semantic class to which the verb belongs but by the semantic compatibility between the verb’s event frame and the construction,the latter should be first considered when we are classifying verbs in a construction.Specifically speaking,semantically related verbs may be divided into different categories due to different relations they establish with the construction;likewise,semantically unrelated verbs may fall into the same category because they are compatible with the construction via the same relation.Therefore,our classification of verbs in EC is not always semantically coherent.Third,an existential event is a durative state in nature.Considering that a verb designates an event with an unspecified aspectual property,the aspectual maker-le and-zhe are needed to stress its durativity.However,different from-zhe that stresses duration in whatever context,-le achieves this function only when the termination of an action implies the initiation of existence.Hence,they are not interchangeable in any cases.In conclusion,based on an event-construal perspective,this study rethinks the nature of the interaction between verbs and ASCs,contributing to refining Argument Structure Construction Grammar,and offers a unified account for the formation of EC,the verbal constraints and the role of aspectual markers in EC.