Theiling Online    Sitemap    Conlang Mailing List HQ   

Re: "There can be"

From:Roger Mills <rfmilly@...>
Date:Saturday, April 12, 2008, 2:38
Stevo wrote:


> >> 2. Some sort of "locative inversion". >> English: (there) is a mouse on the piece of cheese >> > I disagree that this is a locative inversion. "There" in "there is/are" > is a > particle, not used for any other purpose. One can say "There are no books > there", and the second "there" is a locative, but not the first. >
In grade-school grammar, waaaay back when we learned to diagram sentences, it was insisted that the "there" in such sentences was indeed an adverb modifying "is"; "a mouse" was the subject. I can recall many of us felt that was counter-intuitive (though we didn't know that term then). As for "there are no books there," I don't know what we would have been told to do; such difficulties were kept out of sight....