A Cross-linguistic Comparison Between Chinese and English Existential Verbs on the Interaction Between Event Types, Grammatical Aspect and Existential Construction
Abstract：Abstract: While much of previous research has focused on the interaction of the event types of existential verbs, grammatical aspect, and existential construction within one language, this study makes a corpus-based cross-linguistic comparison on the interaction of the three factors. It is discovered that Chinese and English share more peculiarities than similarities in the interactional relation. While the existential verbs’ event types are found to be correlated with the use of perfective and imperfective markers in both languages, there are many peculiarities in the interaction of existential construction and other two factors. The differences, it is believed, can be attributed to the disparities between Chinese and English in the aspectual system as well as in the categorization and semantics of existential construction. This study reveals that, as the various systems of a language are correlated and differ from one language to another, the cross-linguistic contrastive study of a linguistic phenomenon should be approached with sufficient attention to the language system as a whole.
Key words: Existential verb; event type; grammatical aspect; existential construction
