On existential and predlocative construction-functions and construction-strategies
Creators: name: Haspelmath, Martin
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2023

description: Linguists working on existential and predlocative clauses are often confronted with the question whether “non-core” examples such as (1) and (2) should be included in the discussion. (1) non-core existential, English <em>Here is a new pencil.</em> (2) non-core predlocative, English <em>The dragonfly was hovering over the field.</em> To a substantial extent this is a terminological question, which arises because the traditional term usage has not been fully uniform. Here I propose that the distinction between (construction-)strategies and construction(-function)s made by Croft (2022) can throw light on the divergent usage. A construction-strategy is a formally defined comparative concept for a kind of construction, whereas a construction-function is a comparative concept for a construction defined in terms of meaning or discourse function. The term “existential construction” has been widely used for cases like English <em>There is a new pencil on the table</em>, where there is a special prolocative form (<em>there</em>) which seems to be characteristic of such clauses. But are such special forms definitional for “existential constructions” cross-linguistically? I will argue that the answer is that special ingredients such as English <em>there</em>, French <em>il y a</em>, or Hebrew <em>yeš</em> cannot be definitional for “existential construction” as a comparative concept (pace authos like McNally 2016), because different languages have very different kinds of special elements or constructional properties, but we still want to use this well-established term for these different languages (as a comparative concept). Thus, “existential construction” must be defined as a construction-function which can be expressed in all languages (Haspelmath 2022: §4: “a clause construction in which an indefinite and discourse-new nominal phrase is said to be in some location”). There are diverse types of construction-strategies expressing the existential function, and many languages have several. For example, English not only has <em>there</em> existentials but also allows (1), which lacks the element <em>there</em>. Likewise, “predlocative” is defined functionally, and if ‘hover’ is regarded as a posture verb, then (2) is included, because posture is merely a secondary meaning component conflated with the central meaning of locatedness. I will also discuss Creissels’ (2019) recent proposal to conceive of the traditional domain of existential clauses as “inverse-locational”, which is defined in a mixed way, with respect to both functional and formal properties. As the formal properties can be different in different languages, I do not regard Creissels’ proposal as a satisfactory solution to the conceptual problems he identifies. <strong>References</strong> Creissels, Denis. 2019. Inverse-locational predication in typological perspective. <em>Italian Journal of Linguistics </em>31(2). 37–106. Croft, William. 2022. <em>Morphosyntax: Constructions of the world’s languages.</em> Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Haspelmath, Martin. 2022. Nonverbal clause constructions. (To appear, https://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/006673) McNally, Louise. 2016. Existential sentences crosslinguistically: Variations in form and meaning. <em>Annual Review of Linguistics</em> 2(1). 211–231. (doi:10.1146/annurev-linguistics-011415-040837)