Expletive ‘There’ in IPSL: Is it there?

In SL class today, we had the sentence:

(1) There are 100 children in the school

and many such similar sentences. The sign for (1) is:

(1SL)   READ-CHILD(SCHOOL) IX(SCHOOL) a-b-CHILDREN 1-0-0 (HAS)

[Note that the sign for school is actually a compound sign, the variation that exists has only one sign “reading” for school]

Anyway, the point of the discussion is the “pointing” sign IX(SCHOOL) — what is it doing here? Pointing as we know can mark various things including pronouns, demonstratives and locatives. The most likely interpretation here is that “There” is being interpreted as a ‘locative’; however, ‘there’ in the English sentence in (1) is not a locative adverbial but an expletive. What is an expletive?

In simple Linguistic terms it means, meaningless. It’s a strange animal which crops up in many languages when there is no meaningful lexical item to fill up a syntactic position in a clause. The expletive ‘there’ in English crops up in a subject position in sentences where there is nothing else that can be placed in that position. since languages like English has a requirement that the subject position be filled overtly (that is, it cannot be “understood” like in many other languages), the subject position cannot remain vacant. Thus the sentence in (2a) below has an “expletive” versions in (2b):

(2) a. A girl is in the class
b. There is a girl in the class

In most cases, these are considered to be equivalent sentences. That is there is no difference in the meaning of these two sentences. Although this last point is not universally accepted. For example, it has been claimed that the sentence (3a) below is ambiguous (that is, it has two possible meanings), whereas (3b) is not:

(3) a. An error is likely to appear in the proof.
b. There is likely to appear an error in the proof.

Apparently, it is claimed that (3a) is ambiguous between the following two meanings:

(4) a. …. a claim about the proof that it’s likely to be erroneous
b. … persistent error

It is further claimed that (3b) above doesn’t have the (4a) reading. The syntactic theory which is proposed in this connection is very complex but it will suffice to know that one reading is blocked for (3b) because of the expletive nature of ‘there’.

However, in most cases (like (2a,b)), the non-expletive and the expletive constructions are considered to be equivalent. So, this is how expletive elements (like ‘there’) appear in languages — they fulfill some syntactic function but are themselves meaningless.

In short, (1SL) cannot be the sentence for (1). But then, what is the pointing IX doing here?

In this connection, Hidam has an interesting theory that we discussed after the class; IX here is surely pointing but not for locative adverbial like ‘there’ but of ‘in’ of the PP (Preposition Phrase) ‘in the school’. This view is somewhat similar to point I had made some years back in this paper where an expletive ‘there’ is shown to be always related to a PP (note that the sentence ‘there is a man here’ is ok but not ‘*there is a man intelligent’); that is, there seems to be sharing of a ‘location’ information between the expletive THERE and the PP IN THE SCHOOL, they form a chain like (THERE … PP) and share a feature of LOCATION.

I don’t know how far this is going to hold but the post-class discussion revealed that there is perhaps more going on in SL. It is quite likely, that IX here is not just location (for the PP ‘in the X’ but also for definiteness. However, we concluded that Definiteness is not such big deal for SL given the very visual nature of the language and therefore the more important feature of pointing or IX in (1SL) above is actually the location information.

So, I don’t think that the sign for ‘there’ (1) as in (1SL) is ‘mistakenly’ interpreted as a locative adverb ‘there’ (as in ‘The book there’) but is more like a location denoted by the PP. We can thus conclude that IPSL DOES have an expletive ‘there’.