Teaching and Learning the Awareness of Existence in English Existential Sentences

This present study investigates the reasons that cause Chinese students’ difficulties, in learning English existential sentence, there-be structure. A set of questions are designed to examine their awareness of ‘existence’ in both languages. 609 participants attain this study. After data analysis, two findings indicate: (1) Students are used to selecting location as a subject starting an existential sentence which is similar to Chinese syntax, and there-be might be considered of using only when location is not given. (2) With the influence of Chinese syntax, the awareness between the place and the main noun forms because that a thing/object as a subject keeps have / has as its verb could change sentence construction and cannot effectively express the original existence in English. Therefore, this grammatical error stems not only from differences in awareness of existence between languages, but also from different grammar expressions about existence. In addition, in Chinese, existence (there-be) and possession (have/has), are expressed and translated by the only one Chinese character ‘有’. Most teachers normally adopt “have” idea to help interlingual translation to learn EES. However, this teaching might lead to a potential difficulty for students to be aware of existential difference between English and Chinese.

Functions of the noun phrase

Roughly speaking, only four syntactic roles can be distinguished for a noun phrase: subject, object, adverbial phrase, and predicate in a verbal sentence the predicate is a verb, in a nominal sentence it is a noun phrase, and in an existential sentence it is either var or yok. In a verbal sentence one or more objects may occur, depending on the type of verb, transitive or intransitive. Other sentence types do not allow for objects, but all types must have a subject, while one or more adverbial phrases are optional. All this forms the main topic of this top of that, it is explained how noun phrases are applied in genitive-possessive constructions.

СЕМАНТИКА ПРЕДИКАТІВ МІСЦЕПЕРЕБУВАННЯ В РЕЧЕННЯХ СУЧАСНОЇ УКРАЇНСЬКОЇ МОВИ

In propositions of existence, these predicates are combined with an irreferenced name, whose existence is reported by the sentence. The irreferent name of the subject is not mentioned in the previous text and is entered into the fund of knowledge of the addressee of the broadcast with the possibility of further its characterization. The sentence states the presence of the subject, and the local predicates describe the qualitative signs of the subject of being from different positions. Such communicative load is carried by all verbs, which according to the corresponding logical-grammatical conditions transmit the significance of localization. Despite the fact that the local predicates transmit different lexical meanings, they have common categorical attributes: lack of process value and static. The subject of being remains unchanged during a specific time interval within which the event described occurs. The static sign corresponds most to the ontological nature of existence. Categorical semantics imposes an imprint on the meaning of verbal lexeme. The use of such verbs determines the semantic modifications of existential sentences. The structure of the semantics of various verbs contains components of modifying value, which help to create a figurative picture of existential states. The use of the designated verbal lexeme contributes to the enrichment of the semantics of the existential sentence and the expansion of its expressiveness. Prospects for the study of existential sentences are related to the analysis of those elements of the semantics of the sentence, which are determined by the lexical meaning of the verb in the position of the local predicate.

The role of referential givenness in Dutch alternating presentational constructions

Presentational constructions are linguistic structures that can convey all-focus utterances with no topic constituent that serve to introduce a referentially new entity or event into the discourse. Like many other languages, Dutch has several presentational constructions, including a Prosodic Inversion Construction (PIC), a Syntactic Inversion with Filler Insertion Construction (SIFIC) and a Non-Prototypical Cleft Construction (NPC). This article investigates these structures as alternating presentational constructions and focuses on referential givenness as a possible factor influencing the alternation. Based on a data elicitation task, referential givenness is shown to play a role in the choice of alternant. The PIC is predominantly used with unused/inactive and accessible Mental Representations of Referents (MRRs), but it can also contain brand-new MRRs. The NPC is exclusively used with brand-new MRRs. The SIFIC is used mostly with brand-new MRRs, but it can also contain accessible MRRs, in particular in positions other than the syntactic subject. The data elicitation task yielded a number of additional Dutch linguistic structures that could also be considered presentational constructions, including a construction with a perception verb used in a weak verb-like fashion and a construction with an existential sentence combined with a coordinated canonical topic-comment clause.