EXPLETIVE OF THERE

Arranged by :

Akbar Sutan Ibrahim

Irfandy Fajriyansyah

Ainur Rohmah

Putri Satria

Mutia Pawitri

ISLAMIC EDUCATION DEPARTMENT

FACULTY OF ISLAMIC STUDIES

UNIVERSITY OF MUHAMMADIYAH JAKARTA

2018
1. English has expletive pronoun is there, example :
- There is a Norwegian in the garden.

2. There also have non-expletive usages.

- I saw him standing there

3. One way to distinguish between the non-expletive usages is to use stress. Expletive there
cannot be stressed while the there in can be.
- I saw him standing there
- There are three pigs in the garden.

4. Expletives there has nominal associates:

- There is a man in the garden.
- There is a rumor about Bill in the newspaper.

5. Expletive there can only appear in non-positions, positions where no role is assigned.
- There is a cat in the garden.
- I saw there.

6. The way semantic composition takes place all object positions are positions. As a result,
expletive there can never appear in an object position.

7. In addition to the no role requirement, the distribution of expletives is severely

constrained by the nature of the associate and the predicate that appears with there.

a. The associate must be indefinite.

 There is the man in the garden.
 There are two/many/few men in the garden.
 There are the/most/every men in the garden.
 There is John in the garden.
 b. The predicate cannot be a ‘permanent’ property.
 There are several boys sick.
 There are several boys tall

8. The restrictions are amenable to semantic explanations. There is, however, another
constraint on the presence of there which is not easy to explain in terms of semantics:
there cannot appear with transitive verbs.

- There is a man in the garden.

- There arrived three men from Venice.
- There arose a fearful storm.
- There saw two children a pig.
- There gave a girl John a book.

9. For now we will stick with there with the verb be.
- Assumption: Expletive there can only be merged as a Specifier of be (and a small set
of verbs like arrive, appear, vanish, arise, etc).

10. An important fact about sentences involving expletive there is that the verb agrees not
with the expletive itself but with the associate of the expletive.

- There is a man in the garden.

- There are two men in the garden.