Volume 4,Issue 3
The Correlation between Possessive and Existential Constructions in English and Chinese
Chinese possessive sentences (e.g., “I have a pen”) and existential sentences (e.g., “There is a bird in the tree”) both use the predicate 有 (“have/exist”) and exhibit similar syntactic structures. In English, however, possessive and existential constructions are syntactically distinct, yet both are translated into Chinese with 有. Moreover, English prepositional phrases headed by with (e.g., “dry with scattered showers”) also correspond to 有 in Chinese. While prior studies have noted syntactic parallels between Chinese possessive and existential sentences, their cognitive connection remains unexplored, and the three English constructions have not been examined together. This paper argues that Chinese possessive and existential constructions share the same underlying conceptual schema: both encode an attachment relation between a host and a dependent. The English with-construction, though translated simply as 有, retains an underlying semantic sense of accompaniment.
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