Contextualized Existential Constructions in Mandarin Chinese
Received: Jul 26, 2022 ; Revised: Oct 02, 2022 ; Accepted: Nov 07, 2022
Published Online: Dec 31, 2022
ABSTRACT
This paper proposes that in addition to the typical “out-of-the-blue” existential construction, a kind of contextualized existential construction exists in Mandarin Chinese. This form does not exhibit the predicate restriction observed in typical existential constructions cross-linguistically. It is argued that this type of existential construction involves a topic-comment structure and functions as a subtype of the Existential Coda Construction discussed by Zhang (2007, 2008). The current analysis also explains the apparent lack of a definiteness restriction for specific Mandarin Chinese existential constructions.