The Semantic Content Of There And Syntactic Mechanism Of There-be Existential Construction

English existential is a construction with many special properties, which consists of there, an existential verb denoting existence, appearance or disappearance, a NP situated in the postverbal position and followed by a locative phrase. There-be existential construction is one of the controversial constructions in the generative grammar, which needs to be further studied. And the studies of this structure mainly focus on the following issues: the syntactic status of there;the case assignment of the postverbal NP and the Definiteness Effect on the postverbal NP, and the derivation of English existential construction. Although previous analyses have made great achievements, there are still some discrepancies on the above issues. Based on the previous studies, this thesis with there as the point-cut to deeply reanalyze the syntactic features of There-be existential construction and the derivational mechanism of this structure.Most previous studies assume that there is an expletive without semantic content. However, this thesis proposes that there has semantic content in There-be existential construction, but it doesn’t indicate the abstract locative meaning. After careful analyses and demonstration, this thesis proposes that there is a place deixis with deictic meaning. In the framework of Minimalist Program, we assume that there is base-generated in the specifier position of PP in the syntactic derivation of There-be existential construction.Based on this new proposal and Larson’s(1988) VP-Shell theory, this thesis reanalyze the derivation of the There-be existential construction. And according to the Economy Principle and Movement Principle, this thesis gives the reasons for there to move the specifier position of TP rather than other constituents within the structure. And then this thesis indicates the assumption that there has no case feature is unconvincing. It can be attested by the empirical evidences from its occurrence in complex infinitive construction.To conclude, this thesis notes out the unreasonable points of previous analyses of There-be existential constructions. In addition, this thesis gives a new proposal that there has distal meaning with deictic function in There-be existential construction. Accounting for this assumption, this thesis reanalyzes the derivationof this structure to explore its syntactic mechanism. And this thesis wants to provide valuable help for the scholars who will do some further syntactic studies of English existential constructions.