Russian Linguistic Bulletin (Apr 2020)
THE MEANING OF ENGLISH ANTICIPATORY THERE AND ALTERNATIONS OF EXISTENTIAL SENTENCES IN DISCOURSE
Abstract
The proposed study aims to reveal the motivations for alternative uses of existential sentences in inaugural speeches of American presidents. Sentences that state the existence of different kinds of difficulties and problems faced by a society, are based mainly on two types of semantico-syntactic models: (1) syntactic structures with personal subjects and predicates expressed by the verb have or some other semantically and contextually correlative verbs (We have / experience / face / confront problems), including perceptual predicates (We see / experience difficulties) and (2) existential clauses headed by anticipatory there (There are problems). The suggested analysis of the factors that motivate the choice of one of the construction types in utterances about existential situations is based on examples drawn from ten texts of inaugural addresses of American presidents within the time period from 1981 to 2017. As evidenced by linguistic data, the choice of a respective utterance is motivated mainly by the cognitive content conveyed by a particular clausal subject in a discourse context. The study shows that personal and anticipatory subjects of the correlative clauses are distinguished as units of naming the conceptual archetypes participant and experiential region , respectively. The differentiation of the participant (P) and experiential region (R) according to their functional properties is reflected in the distinction of cognitive structures that the participant and experiential region are involved in: an event frame and experiential scheme, respectively. The evocation of the mentioned conceptual archetypes as parts of their cognitive structures motivates, on the one hand, the choice of existential sentences and, on the other hand, the choice of a speech strategy for the description of a particular existential situation.
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