title: Division of labour between the locative inversion construction and the existential constructions in English: perspective and fictive paths
title: The division of labour between the locative inversion construction and the existential constructions in English: perspective and fictive paths
titleType: AlternativeTitle
Creators: name: Li, Edward
name: Li, Qi
Publisher: name: The University of Edinburgh
Year: 2024
Subjects: linguistic constructions
There-existential Construction
Locative Inversion Construction
Hybrid Construction
Information Structure
pragmatics
construction grammar
Windowing of Attention theory
data mining

description: This thesis aims to explore the three closely related constructions in English, namely, existential there, locative inversion and locative Inversion + there + NP (hybrid construction for short), drawing on data from British National Corpus. (1) Existential there: There is a boy behind the tree. (2) Locative inversion: Behind the tree is a boy. (3) Hybrid construction: Behind the tree there is a boy. Although the verb in all three constructions tends to be BE, the locative inversion construction in particular is found with a great variety of verbs in the Corpus, which cannot easily be captured by identifying them as belonging to a known subset of verbs, like for instance unaccusative verbs. This means that the felicitous selection of the verb cannot be (fully) specified by the lexicon, so that instances of the construction in language use cannot be generated by projection from the lexicon. Although the constructions all seem to do a similar job in that they introduce a new entity into the discourse, the locative inversion construction differs from the other two in being much more limited in its distribution to specific genres, particularly fiction. It is for these reasons that the chapters in this thesis progressively focus on this construction. The early chapters propose the hypothesis that the use of locative inversion pre-supposes that the scene is “surveyable”, which limits the situations in which it is felicitous. To account for the fact that the construction as a whole appears to coerce a specific reading of the verb, subsequent chapters focus on different frameworks, such as Sign-based Construction Grammar, Goldberg’s Construction Grammar, and Talmy’s Cognitive Semantics, with the latter’s theory of windowing of attention (Talmy 2000) turning out to be the most helpful in terms of accounting for all the verbs used with locative inversion in the corpus, even the “outliers” that are only found once or twice. These verbs are felicitous due to the fact that they combine with the preverbal prepositional phrase to create what Talmy calls “fictive paths”. The fictive path coerces a focus on an aspect of the verb that is often not part of its core semantics but refers to the existence, emergence or appearance of an entity. The fact that locative inversion is found to be strongly associated with fiction is in accordance with its discourse function as a narrative strategy, to force the reader’s gaze along a fictive path in order to take a particular perspective that helps to visualize the scene. The conclusion is that a constructional view and usage-based approach are best able to account for the diversity of the verbs occurring in locative inversion; identifying the mechanisms behind creative usages demonstrates that language use is a very dynamic process.