Forum: ell.stackexchange.com
Tags: <meaning><meaning-in-context>
Title: What does "there lived here then" mean?
Question: There lived here then,  away at the North, a beautiful princess, who was also a powerful sorceress.   The sentence is cited from  The Wizard of Oz, page 37 .  What do the words in bold mean?  Thank you!

Answers:
sents: text: The word there has no meaning.
text: It is the same word we see in sentences like:
text: There is a fly in my soup.
text: In the sentence from the Wizard of Oz, the writer has used it so that the noun phrase "a beautiful princess, who was also a powerful sorceress" appears at the end of the sentence instead of the beginning.
text: This makes the sentence more interesting.
text: This is called a presentational construction.
text: The sentence means: A beautiful princess, who was also a powerful sorceress, lived here then.
text: The word then means at that time .
text: The word here means in this place .
answer_details: author: ell.stackexchange.com/users/8084/Araucaria - Not here any more.
score: 17
sents: text: To add to @Araucaria's answer, it's important to note that this is a rather old-fashioned sentence construction and would not be used in spoken English, even when L Frank Baum wrote his books.
text: Using old-fashioned grammar makes it sound like an older fairytale though.
text: These days, the construction "there is a fly in my soup" is the normal way to describe something's presence, but any verb beyond "is/are/were/will be" is not normally used.
text: So we would say "there was a fly, swimming in my soup" (where "swimming in my soup" is a further description of the fly's presence), but not "there swam a fly in my soup".
text: When dealing with archaic grammar to help someone who doesn't have English as a first language, I think it's important to be clear about what a native English speaker today can read and understand, and what a native English speaker would actually say themselves.
answer_details: author: ell.stackexchange.com/users/21770/Graham
score: 10
sents: text: The word "there" sometimes appears just to introduce a concept, rather than specifying a particular location, as in: Limerick rhymes: "There once was a girl from Nantucket..." Expressions of ultimate approval: "There will never be another ... like him." Presence or absence: "There are no more carrots."
text: Suggestion: "There's no better time to...
text: (e.g.
text: buy a house)
text: " General (non-specific) location:
text: " There you are!"
text: " There they go!"
text: (In both of these examples, the actual location is unimportant; the first means " At last I've found you, ", and the second means " You can see them now ", and their location is even continuously changing and their actual destination irrelevant and usually completely unknown ).
text: Most authors would avoid including both " here " and " there " in the same phrase, due to the obvious potential for ambiguity and confusion.
answer_details: author: ell.stackexchange.com/users/42285/jaxter
score: 3
sents: text: There lived here then, away at the North, a beautiful princess, who was also a powerful sorceress.
text: This is an old-fashioned way of writing, trying (successfully) to portray the feeling of old fairy tales.
text: So what does it mean?
text: "then" is there to convey that the fact reported here
text: follows from something stated previously.
text: There will have been an introductory phrase.
text: We could replace it loosely by "so". "
text: So there lived here...
text: " "there lived" is much the same construction as "there was".
text: We could replace it by "somebody lived" - That gives us the exact meaning of the phrase:"So a beautiful princess lived here, away at the North, and she was also a powerful sorceress."
text: But that's boring.
text: The Brothers Grimm version has more style (even if it's hard to read).
answer_details: author: ell.stackexchange.com/users/9436/RedSonja
score: 1
sents: text: The word 'then' in the emboldened phrase refers to some information that the reader or character in the story is already aware of; so saying 'then' refers to that information to continues the story.
text: That is my understanding of it.
text: I must also say, sentence constructions such as this are fairly archaic.
answer_details: author: ell.stackexchange.com/users/31900/tom
score: 1

Summary of the answers:
This is called a  presentational  construction. The sentence means:  A beautiful princess, who was also a powerful sorceress, lived here then. The word  then  means  at that time.   The word  here  means  in this place.
"There" is sometimes used to introduce a concept. In this sentence, it is a presentational construction and means "A beautiful princess, who was also a powerful sorceress, lived here then", in which "then" means "at that time" and "here" means "in this place". The grammar in this sentence makes it sound more old-fashioned, like a fairytale.