Re: "There can be"

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....