English Sentences Beginning with there and their Vietnamese Counterparts

Abstract

English sentences beginning with there, also called English there-constructions, do not constitute only existential sentences; most important among their other uses are presentational there-constructions. It is almost impossible to distinguish existential sentences beginning with Empty there, which is not stressed and has no lexical meaning, from presentational there-constructions beginning with Locative there, which is pronounced with some degree of stress and has its denotative meaning as opposite to that of the adverb here. Therefore, language users have to care for other sentence components, both obligatory and optional, that follow there in the clause in question. Comparing English there-constructions and their Vietnamese counterparts helps to identify translated versions of each subtype of English there-constructions, both semantically and pragmatically equivalent, irrespective of the fact that Vietnamese has neither the empty subject nor subject-verb inversion – the two phenomena quite easily observed in a Subject-prominent language like English.