Form-use Mapping Of There-construction

There-construction is something that a book on grammar cannot afford to ignore. Its formal features and behavior within the system of language are frequently discussed in the literature. Many studies have been conducted on its structure and formal characteristics within the frameworks of Transformational Grammar and Systemic-functional Grammar (Breivik 1975, 1981, 1990; Milsark 1977, 1979; Hannay 1985; Lumsden 1988). Previous research on there-construction, has contributed a lot to our understanding of this phenomenon, but they are problematic in the following two aspects: first, previous research has been confined to formal characteristics of there-construction, especially such topics as the definiteness effect, property predication restriction and concord, and little attention has been paid to the motivating correspondence between form and meaning of there-construction; second, although existential there-constructions have received a great deal of attention, inadequate attention has been paid to deictic there-constructions and little has been done to distinguish the existential there from the deictic there, and to study the relationship between them.All in all, there-construction is a classical case that every theory of grammar must deal with, and where all previous approaches have been found wanting. None of those previous theories of grammar, or other contemporary theories, has been able to accountfor the complicated phenomenon of tfzere-construction adequately.This thesis is based on Construction Grammar Theory, which is mainly elaborated by Charles Fillmore (1990) and Adele E. Goldberg (1995). Construction Grammar has developed from Generative Grammar, Functional Grammar, Frame Semantics and especially Cognitive Grammar, but it cannot be equated with any one of them. It highlights the importance of two concepts: grammatical construction and motivation. According to this theory, the grammar of a language is a collection of grammatical constructions, where each construction is a form-meaning pair, i.e., a syntactic configuration pairing with meaning and use associated with that syntactic configuration. It also assumes that there are motivating correspondences between form and meaning/use of grammatical constructions, i.e., most of formal features of a grammatical construction are motivated by its meaning and use.This thesis is an attempt to explore f/iere-construction within the framework of Construction Grammar Theory. The basic assumption of this thesis is the following: f/zere-construction is an instance of grammatical constructions—a symbolic model that pairs syntactic conditions with semantic and pragmatic conditions, rather than a mere transformational variant of the simple sentences, i.e., its form and meaning are closely correlated with each other. Following Lakoff (1987), this thesis argues that there-constniction covers both deictic f/iere-constructions (DTCs) and existential there-constructions (ETCs). As for the relationship between deictic there -constructions and existential r/iere-constructions, this thesis assumes that deictic there is in some sense the more basic of the two and that the existential use is extended from the deictic use.This thesis falls into five chapters:Chapter One is a short introduction. It briefly reviews the various definitions of //zere-construction, presents the necessity of exploring f/iere-construction within the framework of Construction Grammar Theory, and outlines the structure of this thesis.Chapter Two presents a review of transformational and systemic-functional approaches to and Lakoff's analysis of f/iere-construction, which aims to point out the problems and inadequacies within them.Chapter Three provides the theoretical framework for the present study. It reviews...