存在句中及物动词施事的隐现问题研究

The Occurrence of Agents of Transitive Verbs in Existential Sentences

本文对存在句及物动词施事在句内和篇章上的表现进行考察,发现其施事表现出以下特点:在句中一般不出现;在篇章中一般不明确;在叙事上与主要场景事件不相关。文章认为,静态存在句从句法和语义上共同保障了其对状态呈现者的凸显和对其他论旨角色的弱化,这使得存在句中及物动词的施事表现出了上述特点;而这些特点体现了存在句“作格性”的观察视角,即存在句抑制及物性角度所必需的“有动力的动作者”(也就是施事),更加强调“存在”这种现象本身。

This paper investigates the occurrence of agents of transitive verbs in existential sentences in Mandarin.It is known that many kinds of verbs can appear in existential sentences(Gu 1997;Yang 1999).However,in these sentences,the agents of transitive verbs cannot be found and are always difficult to be recovered.This phenomenon has been analyzed from the perspective of generative grammar(Gu 1997;Pan 1997),without paying attention to the role that discourse may play in the suppression of agents in existential sentences.This paper focuses on the occurrence of agents of transitive verbs in existential sentences from the perspective of functional grammar.The agents of transitive verbs in existential sentences exhibit the following characteristics.Firstly,it usually does not appear in existential sentences,regardless of whether the forms of the predicates are“verb+zhe”or“verb+le”.Although the existential sentence with“verb+le”seems acceptable if the agent is realized,it is seldom found in real corpus.Secondly,in general,the agents are absent in the text.In some cases,the agent seems to appear but actually is still ambiguous.Specifically,when a“possible agent”appears,we can hardly make sure that it is definitely the agent of the transitive verb in the existential sentence.Its position is odd and its absence can scarcely affect the sentence meaning.According to the analysis of the paper,in an existential sentence,the state presenter is highlighted and other semantic roles are weakened.This results in the suppression of the agents.In conclusion,this paper holds the view that the agents of transitive verbs are not only absent in the sentences,but also are not implicated.It shows the“ergative”perspective of observation,which means although many kinds of verbs are allowed to be used in the existential sentences,their meaning of“action”is weakened while their meaning of“existence”is highlighted.Existential sentences suppress the“actor”(i.e.,agent),and emphasize the phenomenon of“existence”.