Properties of the Existential There Construction: Agreement and Definiteness

초록

It is well known that the existential there construction (ETC) exhibits seemingly idiosyncratic properties with respect to number-agreement and definiteness. Contrary to the views of traditional and previous generative grammars, we have found that is/was and ‘s can agree with singular and plural NPs immediately following the verb in the ETC and that the NPs can be definite or indefinite. To handle this, we claim that the use of definiteness in the ETC is pragmatically governed by the speaker’s assumption that the listener can infer the referent of the definite NP from context. Meanwhile, the sociolinguistic analysis of number-agreement suggests that the singular is/was are increasingly used to co-occur with plural NPs in spoken English and the contracted form ‘s functions as a number-neutral variant. These observations demonstrate how the ETC reflects both pragmatic reasoning and sociolinguistic changes in English usage. We implement these ideas above into a construction-based grammar: the generating system of the ETC governing (in)definite NPs and the lexicon allowing is/was to agree with plural NPs. This theory enables us to account for the peculiar properties of the ETC without positing additional rules.

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