英语中的事物类存在句和事件类存在句  

Entity-and Event-Existentials in English

作　　者：王勇[1] WANG Yong(Sun Yat-sen University,Guangzhou 510275,China)

机构地区：[1]中山大学,广东广州510275

出　　处：《外国语》2024年第4期15-27,共13页Journal of Foreign Languages

摘　　要：一般认为,存在句是表示存在的,至于表示什么的存在,目前的文献或是语焉不详,或是默认为表示事物的存在,即认为存在的主体为事物。但有些存在句中的存在主体不是事物而是事件(或状态),可称之为事件类存在句。类型学中针对存在句中存在主体的语义特征提出了事物类存在句和事件类存在句的二分法。英语中是否存在这两类存在句,各自在词汇语法、语义功能上有何特征,这些问题都值得探讨。本文通过检视文献中对英语存在句句法结构和语义特征的讨论,试图将存在句的语义二分法和文献中结构二分法关联起来,在基于大量语料的基础上运用功能语言学的有关概念和理论,讨论英语中两类存在句的句法表现、语义特征及其功能动因。It is generally held that existentials are to assert the existence of entities of some kind,and few studies have been conducted to probe into the nature of the existent,or it is just taken for granted that the existent is something.However,in some existentials,the existent is not a thing,but an event or a situation,and thus the existential in question is not to assert the existence of a thing,but the existence or occurrence of an event or a situation.A semantic typology of existentials into entity-and event-existentials has been proposed from a crosslinguistic perspective.This study is to investigate whether this typology applies to English existentials,with reference to their structural types and their analyses in the literature.It is found that the semantic typology may not only be taken as the semantic motivation of the structural typology and the respective syntactic analyses posited in the literature,it also has implications for the semantic issues of the Definiteness Effect and the Predication Restriction.An examination of corpus examples derived from BNC provides further justification for recognizing the two semantic types of existentials in English.

关 键 词：存在句 事物 事件 类型学 

分 类 号：H043[语言文字—语言学]