Contextualized Existential Constructions in Mandarin Chinese

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.