Lyons (1977: 442–445) distinguishes three types of entities: first-order, second-order, and third-order entities. Generally speaking, first-order entities are physical objects such as animals, people, plants, artifacts, e.g., dog, woman, tulip, and car. The ontological statuses of these entities are relatively stable from a perceptual point of view. They exist in three-dimensional space, at any point in time, and they are publicly observable. Second-order entities are events, processes/activities, and states; they are what are referred to as "states of affairs". These entities are located in time and are said to occur/take place. Third-order entities are abstract; they are outside both space and time. These include facts, concepts, ideas, possibilities, and propositions (Lyons1977: 442ff, Vendler1967/2002: 242, 244, 246, Dik1997: 136).
We adopt the term events fromVendler (1997/2002) and Peterson (1997: 7, 81) to refer to second-order entities in Lyons’ terms and states of affairs in Dik’s (1997) terms. This is a cover term including actions, activities, situations, conditions, processes, etc., which can be predicated by such verbs as occur, last, begin, end, cause, etc. (Peterson1997: 92).
In Chinese, existentials not only assert the existence of things, but also that of events. However, it is taken for granted that they are only to express the existence of things. On the other hand, there are those clause patterns that are formally similar to the existential, but the existents in them are not things but events. The so-called pseudo-existentials (e.g., (3)) are cases in point.
There are three authors who have discussed event-existentials, though the terms they employ are different. Lin (2008: 74–76) finds that the following two clauses are different:
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(12)
is an existential clause, whereas (13) is an occurrence clause, which expresses the occurrence of an event. According to Lin, yǒu and fāshēng are both light verbs and they both take locative nominals as subjects. In existentials, the locative element denotes the place where something exists. But in occurrence clause, it does not necessarily refer to the setting where the event in question occurs, e.g.:
Lin (2008: 76) notes that the above example expresses that the event of the sinking of two boats occurred and that wǒmen cūnzilǐ ("our village") is not the place where the sinking occurred; it denotes the entity affected by the event. He (Lin2008: 76) thinks that (8) is a clause of occurrence, with Wáng Miǎn as the locative subject. But Lin (2008) is an exclusive study of the locative subject in Chinese. He only mentions occurrence clauses in passing.
Li (2009) throws doubt on plausibility of clauses of disappearance as a sub-type of existentials, for she finds they seldom occur in actual texts. Even with those few examples, it can hardly be said that they express the disappearance of something:
Li’s (2009) investigation shows that such clauses are not employed to convey the meaning of "there (dis)appears something in someplace", but to assert the occurrence of certain events. Occurrence includes the meaning of (dis)appearance, but it is not restricted to it. Li suggests the term clause of occurrence in contrast to clause of existence. The former includes such clauses as (3) and (8), and parts of traditional existentials. However, she does not formally define the term, neither does she explicate its domain or how it is related to traditional existentials. What’s more, though the term occurrence caters for the meaning of "VG ^ NG", it does not take into consideration the whole construction (see (22)). We hold that different configurations convey different meanings, and that the clause initial NGL is obligatory for the whole clause to be called an event-existential.
In English, there is not such a distinction between thing- and event- existentials; the same construction (i.e., there-existential) can be used to assert the existence of both types of entities (Halliday2004: 256):
Of the above three examples, (17) expresses the existence of things (i.e., aboriginal paintings that tell the legends of this ancient people), and (18) and (19) that of events (i.e., comparable political campaign and confusion, shouting and breaking of chairs respectively). Halliday (2004: 258) writes: "In principle, there can ‘exist’ any kind of phenomenon that can be construed as a ‘thing’: person, object, institution, abstraction, but also any action and event…" In English actions and events can be nominalized as things. But this is not available in Chinese, where existence of second-order entities has to be conveyed through processes. Compare:
Event-existentials resemble thing-existentials in having the following syntactic configuration:
Semantically, the former expresses occurrence of events or existence of states. The prototypical process for thing-existentials is yǒu and that for event-existentials is fāshēng (Tao2001: 151). The probe for thing-existentials is: What is there (in NGL)? That for event-existentials is: What is happening there (in NGL)?
The examples discussed above, including (5), (8), (9), (13), (14), (15), (16), and (20), are all event-existentials. Some of them are considered thing-existentials, others PSPO clauses, still others dynamic existentials or clauses of (dis)appearance in previous studies. We will show how each of them fit into event-existentials.
We begin with so-called pseudo-existentials. These are exemplified by (3) and (20). Since they look like thing-existentials (both share the structure of (22)), they are often treated as such (Song2007: 98). But they are not. Fan (1963) brings out their difference through yǒu replacement (cf. Zhu1980: 64, Lu1997: 24–26), which can be applied to thing-existentials:
But this cannot be applied to event-existentials, e.g.,
The yǒu-replacement test is valid in showing that clauses such as (3) are not real existentials. Along this line of analysis, we cannot help but ask: What are pseudo-existentials, if they are not genuine existentials (i.e., thing-existentials)? How do we explain the differences between them? The concept of event-existentials can help answer these questions. The existents in event-existentials are not things, but events. (3) is not to assert the existence of xì, but the happening of the performance or the singing of it. Both types of existentials express existence by virtue of the configuration of the initial NGL and the two following elements, though the latter are different in meaning (see the next section).
Second, PSPO clauses are also event-existentials. Apart from (8) and (14), (24) is another example.
As we reviewed in the preceding section, some scholars notice that such clauses are related to existentials; they even believe that they belong to existentials. However, it is evident that (8), (14), and (24) are not to assert the existence of fùqīn, liǎngsōu chuán, and kèrén. Rather they express the meanings that the events of "father died", "two boats sank", and "guest came to visit" occur to Wáng Miǎn, cūnzi, and Xiào Zhǎng respectively. On the other hand, Wáng Miǎn and fùqīn, cūnzi and liǎngsōu chuán, and Xiào Zhǎng and kèrén stand in a relationship of possessor and possessed respectively. Cross-linguistically, possession is not inherently different from location. To be specific, possessors are locative. They may take such case forms as locative, adessive, or prepositions and locative words; these are locative in nature (Lyons1967, Clark1978: 118, Freeze1992, Zeitoun et al.1999, Baron & Herslund2001, Abdoulaye2006, Peeters et al.2006, Wang and Zhou2012, Wang and Xu2013). This explains the relatedness of existentials and PSPO clauses: In both constructions, the clause-initial NG is locative, and they both express existence, with the existent being things in the former, and events in the latter.
Similarly, clauses of disappearance (e.g., (5)) are event-existentials, for the simple reason that they express existence/occurrence of events rather than things. Finally, it should be pointed out that, as the above discussion suggests, thing existentials do not constitute a homogeneous category. Those existentials whose processes are realized by verbal groups other than yǒu denote the occurrence/existence of event to some extent. Thing-existentials and event-existentials form a continuum. This is what we will elaborate on in the following two sections.