Existential constructions

Sarda, Laure; Lena, Ludovica

doi:10.1075/hcp.76.01sar

Human Cognitive Processing

2023

DOI: 10.1075/hcp.76.01sar

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Existential constructions

Laure Sarda

Ludovica Lena

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2024

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Cited by 4 publications

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Negative existentials and presentationals in Chinese

Lena

2024

LiC

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This study investigates the translation strategies for the negated counterparts of yǒu rén ‘there is someone, there are people’ in a parallel corpus composed of Chinese-to-English aligned narrative texts. It specifically explores the distinction between existentials and presentationals in negative contexts. The analysis shows that negative existentials convey human absence in a given location, with the English translation often thematizing the location and implicitizing the human entity to varying degrees. The study contributes to the debate on whether presentationals can be negated, arguing that while negative presentationals do not introduce discourse referents, they express the occurrence of nonevents tied to spatiotemporal coordinates just like events. These sentences often establish Set-Member relationships with discourse-old groups, visible in English translations through partitive nouns (e.g., none, no one of them) or referring expressions referencing the Set (e.g., they, everyone). In other instances, negative presentationals convey counterexpectational meaning, indicating the non-occurrence of an expected event. In all cases, negative presentationals are thus strongly tied to the cotext and cannot be uttered “out of the blue”

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Negative existentials and presentationals in Chinese

Lena

2024

LiC

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Demonstrative this/that and gestures

Pan,

2024

P&C

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This paper addresses the unresolved question of whether demonstrative this/that and their accompanying gestures serve the same function. By utilizing Langacker’s notion of Current Discourse Space (CDS) and integrating gesture studies and frame semantics, this research models the entire process of demonstrative use and points to the distinct roles that demonstratives and gestures play in each usage event. The findings reveal that their functions are indeed different: the gesture (gazing) initially singles out an entity as a target, followed by the demonstratives encoding it phonetically. Subsequently, the demonstratives evoke the initiation of a targeting act by the hearer, and the gesture (pointing) specifically identifies the entity during the decoding process. Based on the notion of distinguishing role and value, this study proposes that the semantic content (‘target’) encoded by demonstratives is the role (‘element’) within the viewing (attention)-target event frame, rather than its value (‘entity’). This principle applies to both exophoric and anaphoric contexts, providing a unified conceptual foundation for the function of demonstratives. In the light of these findings, the article also offers novel perspectives on the function of demonstratives as grounding elements, contributing to a deeper understanding of their role in communication.

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Encoding indefinite human reference without indefinite pronouns: the case of Chinese presentationals

Lena

2024

Folia Linguistica

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The Chinese sequence yǒu rén [exist person] is both the minimal existential-presentational construction and the functional equivalent of indefinite pronouns in encoding indefinite human reference. This dual characteristic prompts the question of whether yǒu rén functions as a presentational construction comparable to similar forms in other languages. Building on a literary corpus of Chinese contemporary novels, this study aims to determine if yǒu rén displays the behavioral properties of presentational constructions. First, presentational yǒu rén constructions are distinguished from both locative-existential and generic-existential ones based on a set of features including predicate selection in the coda, presence and function of the locative expression, and the co-dependent interpretation of the nominal rén. Next, the discourse function of yǒu rén is examined by assessing its contrast with regular nonpresentational sentences and the anaphoric potential of the entity it introduces. While establishing the boundaries between the three construction types, the study also analyzes the co-expression pattern observed within a gradient and compositional approach.

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Existential constructions

Cited by 4 publications

References 50 publications

Negative existentials and presentationals in Chinese

Negative existentials and presentationals in Chinese

Demonstrative this/that and gestures

Encoding indefinite human reference without indefinite pronouns: the case of Chinese presentationals

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