There 구문과 담화-화영적 분석

There-construction and a discourse/pragmatic analysis

There-constructions have been studied so far in terms of the syntactic or semantic approach. The purpose of this paper is to examine the differences between existential there-sentences and presentational there-sentences. Structurally, the former contains be as its main verb, whereas the latter contains some other main verb as its main verb. This lexical difference corresponds to a functional difference as well. Bolinger(l977) argues that existential there is an extension of locative there, and that it presents something to our minds(or brings a piece of krowledge into consciousness). We have found that existential there differs from presentational there in being sensitive to the hearer-status rather than the discourse-status of the postverbal NP. That is, existential there requires that the postverbal NP be new to the hearer, whereas the felicious use of a presentational there-sentence requires that its postverbal NP represent information that is new to the discourse. However, as we will show, it is possible for an entity to be treated by the speaker as being hearer-old in one respect yet hearer-new in another. Following Ward & Birner(1995), we have tired to show that the two types of complementary distribution in depending on either the status of discourse or that of the hearer in terms of discourse and pragmatics exist, in both of which such factors as speaker, hearer and discourse are taken into consideration.