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Abstract The existential construction is taken to express the objective relation of spatial existence. However, language use and meaning are mediated by the construal of its users, even more so with Mandarin Chinese as a paratactic language, in encoding and decoding communicative intentions and the human cognition of the world. Such mediation exemplifies the fusion of both objectivity and subjectivity. The paper categorizes the you (有) construction as the prototypical existential construction, and the shi (是) existential construction, the possessive existential construction, the subject-predicate existential construction and the compound blended existential construction as non-prototypcial ones. The research shows that although they are different in syntactic form and function, they have the same motivations in achieving subjectivity through topicalization, metonymy and metaphor. The paper also holds that the term “existential construction” can be adequately used as an umbrella term to cover all the variations of the existential construction family.
Key words: existential construction; subjectivity; realization
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