Existential there-construction as a means of presentation in narrative (a corpus-based syntactic-semantic analysis)

Abstract

The present paper looks at the role of the English verb operating in Presentation Scale sentences within fiction narrative from the point of view of both dynamic and static semantics. It is a part of a corpus-based research in the area of the sentences implementing the so-called Presentation Scale (Firbas, 1992; Svoboda, 2006), which is predominantly focused on the occurrence and the syntactic-semantic typology of Presentation sentences within narratives and the semantic as well as syntactic character of the English Presentation verb. It examines the most frequent structure that is capable of presenting a new phenomenon on the scene, viz, the existential construction. For the purpose of analysis, C. S. Lewis' The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is used. Special attention is paid to the syntactic semantic character of the Pr-verbs that operate in the existential construction there + other verb than be.