English presentative semantic patterns as seen through a parallel translation corpus

Abstract

Abstract The present paper studies the English presentative semantic pattern whose function is to introduce a new phenomenon into the discourse, relating it to an already established location. A contrastive (English-Czech) cross-linguistic corpus-assisted approach is applied to explore syntactically diverse forms which represent the same presentative semantic pattern: ‘location – presentation verb – new phenomenon’. We focus on English sentences in which the location is expressed syntactically as the subject. The English constructions with a locative subject were detected as translation counterparts of Czech sentence-initial locative adverbials realized by prepositional phrases. Our study demonstrates that the potential of the sentence to introduce a new phenomenon in discourse is primarily based on the semantics of the verb.