On English Locative Subjects

Abstract

The paper analyses English sentences with thematic locative subjects. These subjects were detected as translation counterparts of Czech sentenceinitial locative adverbials realized by prepositional phrases with the prepositions do (into), na (on), v/ve (in), z/ze (from) complemented by a noun. In the corresponding English structure, the initial scene-setting adverbial is reflected in the thematic subject, which results in the locative semantics of the subject. The sentences are analysed from syntactic, semantic and FSP aspects. From the syntactic point of view, we found five syntactic patterns of the English sentences with a locative subject (SV, SVA, SVO, SVpassA and SVCs) that correspond to Czech sentences with initial locative adverbials. On the FSP level the paper studies the potential of the sentences to implement the Presentation or Quality Scale. Since it is the “semantic content of the verb that actuates the presentation semantics of the sentence” (Duškova, 2015a: 260), major attention is paid to the syntactic-semantic structure of the verb. The analysis of the semantics of the English sentences results in the identification of two semantic classes of verbs which co-occur with the English locative subject.

Keywords

• contrastive approach
• locative subject
• presentation scale
• quality scale
• presentative verbs