Comparing Existential Sentences in Chinese, English and Vietnamese from the Perspective of Linguistic Typology

Abstract

Chinese existential sentences denote “somewhere appears, exists or disappears something or someone” (someone or something exists, appears or disappears somewhere). This paper comes from the perspective of semantics and syntax to analyze and find out more about the existential sentences of Vietnamese with English and Chinese, and compares the similarities and differences of the three components “component of place”; “verb indicating the existence”; the "existence subject" of the three languages. The paper has applied the cognitive theory of spatial relationships to explain the different orders of existential sentences in these three languages. The paper goes one step further with the preliminary study of existential sentences in Japanese, Korean, and Thai, and finds that Eastern languages ​​can use the form of existential sentences to express two meanings: one is “in somewhere exists something”; and two is “in somewhere is lost something”, but Indo-European English cannot use the form of the existential sentence to express the idea “in somewhere is lost something”.