A Corpus-based Study Of There’s+NP_plfrom The Perspective Of Grammaticalization

There-sentence,a common structure,is widely used.Recently,the use of there’s+NPpl in English-speaking countries has been increasing.With there s’ being the abbreviated form of there is,the noun phrase is in the plural,which is a violation of the rules of grammar.Few studies have paid attention to this phenomenon.Almost all the works on grammaticalization make only a passing reference to there’s+NPpl.Based on the theoretical framework of grammaticalization,this paper adopts the synchronic and diachronic method combining with description and explanation to investigate the grammaticalization of there’s+NPpl,which is of great significance and helps to comprehensively analyze the grammaticalization of language phenomena.On this basis,this paper also takes COCA,Spoken BNC2014 and BASE as the source of corpus statistical analysis and tries to answer the following questions1.What is the relationship between there be and there’s+NPpl?2.How is there’s+NPpl diachronically and synchronically distributed?3.What are the grammaticalization motivations of there’s+NPpl?With the help of COCA,there’s+NPpl is the product of the reduction effect and the latest stage of grammaticalization of there be.This structure is mainly in spoken and has been already appeared in written English.The evolution process of there’s+NPpl is caused by language internal motivation,which is the clarity principle and economy principle;language external motivations,which are high frequency,subjectivity,as well as misuse;and cognitive motivation.