Contextualization as a Factor for the Acceptability of the Chinese Existential You-sentences

Abstract

In recent years, more and more researches are investigating the definite descriptions occurring in the Chinese existential you-sentences. One of the issues still looking for a good solution is: some kind s of the existential sentences involve definite NPs, not indefinite NPs, but arc still acceptable, like you na ben shu zai wo zher (That book is with me, I have that book)-what would be an appropriate answer that can explain cases like this. In the present paper, I will show how accessibility (e.g. Ariel 2001, 2006, among others) can be taken as a useful tool to solve the problem. The main purpose of this paper is to find a good explanation for some seemingly unacceptable existential sentences to become acceptable in other situations. Consider the following examples: (1) *wuzi-li you neige ren/meige ren. 'There is that/every person in the room.' (2) *you Laoli zhong tou jiang le. 'There is Laoli hitting the jack pol.' Generally, we assume that these sentences arc the opening of a conversation or starting of a discourse. Without a discourse that pre-mentions the referents in these two sentences, the mental accessibility is low. And we can see, low accessibility, without an informative description or NP, would lead to inaccessibility. Whereas, if we add more contextual information before the NPs, i.e. neige ren/meige ren and Laoli, the sentences can be rescued: (1') wuzi-li you ni jian guo de neige ren/meige ren. 'There is that/every person you have seen in the room.' (2') you ge bi de Laoli zhong tou jiang le. 'There is our neighhor Laoli hitting the jack pot.' As we shall sec, the added adjective description ni jian guo de and ge bi de make the two sentences acceptable, It is noteworthy that if these referents arc pre-mentioned in the discourse, and create a mutual cognitive environment, the additional informative description s not so necessary.