nowhere...is there......... please define

[Glenski]

Nowhere in the world is there a coastline like that one!

Please identify the subject (I think it is coastline).

Please describe the part of speech for "there" and for the phrase "nowhere in the world". I believe they are adverbs of location, although "there" could also be a kind of preparatory subject. In any case, how would you diagram this sentence?

[Stephen Jones]

'Nowhere in the world' is an adverbial of location.

The subject is 'there' and 'a coastline like this one' is the noun complement.

Therefore I would say you should classify 'there' as a pronoun (since it is what you call a preparatory subject).

The sentence is exaclty the same as the one you got in Streamline Unit 6.
There is an apple in the fridge

[Glenski]

Sorry, Stephen. I cannot accept "there" as a pronoun. Never heard such a thing in my life.

There, as you have already agreed, is a preparatory (or dummy) subject. That means the real subject is something else, and that's why I said it is coastline.

Anyone else for sentence diagrams?

[noel]

Apparently, 'there' is an expletive, so it's best used with caution:

http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/expletive

[Stephen Jones]

Sorry, Stephen. I cannot accept "there" as a pronoun. Never heard such a thing in my life.

Well, you have now!

There, as you have already agreed, is a preparatory (or dummy) subject. That means the real subject is something else, and that's why I said it is coastline.

Nope, unlike the real Slim Shady the real subject doesn't have to stand up or even exist.
Look at this sentence. It's raining.
'It' is the dummy subject, but there's no other subject.
So if we accept that 'there' is the subject of the sentence, then it must be either a noun or a pronoun.
You might not like it, but any other analysis of the sentence will mean you are devising a whole new set of rules just for 'there is/there are"

[Glenski]

Sorry, again, Stephen, but you just don't get it.

Preparatory subject (or expletive, as in the link's description) using "there" is not the same as the empty subject "it". I know that much. No need to invent new rules.

Since I don't accept that "there" is the REAL subject of that sentence, what you said about calling it a noun or pronoun is irrelevant.

Any other "experts" out there?

[Stephen Jones]

If 'there' is the subject, preparatory or real, then it is going to have to be a noun or a pronoun.

Parts of speech are a very clumsy way of describing English, and you have just come across an example. You also seem to be under the impression that there is a "right" answer, that rules about subjects, objects and so on are cast in stone, and have some kind of indepenedent existence.

I prefer to say that
That/this/it/there is a pen on the table
can all be analyzed the same way.

If you decide you want to analyze
There is a pen on the table differently, then you will find yourself introducing other awkwardnesses.

In these kind of cirumstances, I just look the thing up in my favourite grammar book, and accept what it says. I use "A University Grammar of English" by Quirk and Greenbaum, but as I'm on holiday I have no access to any of my books.

[Harzer]

I kind of have to agree with Glenski on this point, so there.

I don't see how you can analyze "that/this/it is a pen on the table" and "there is a pen on the table" in the same way.

The first three are saying "that/this/the thing on the table is (what we call) a pen". They are indicating the identity between a given object and a word in the language.

The other sentence is saying "there exists a situation such that a pen is on the table" which is showing the identity between a theoretically possible situation and an actual one.

In the other language which I know well, German, this difference is underlined by using a different verb in each sentence.

For the linguistic type of identification one uses the verb 'sein' -> das/dies/es IST ein Kuli auf dem Tisch.

For existential identification one uses the verb 'geben' -> es GIBT einen Kuli auf dem Tisch" or a verb specifying the actual state of the object -> " es LIEGT ein Kuli auf dem Tisch."

I believe the same distinction is made in Spanish using ESTAR in the first case and HABER in the second. In French one uses "etre" and "il y a".

That English conflates these various meanings into "to be" has led to some interesting philosophical quandaries, notably in mistranslating certain texts of Plato's, I seem to recall.

Did that make any sense? If I have upset you all I can say is "there, there".

Harzer

[Stephen Jones]

Other languages are different from English in many other ways.

Anyway, my point is that the idea of parts of speech is not very useful for English.

But please, if you do disagree - suggest something else.

[Harzer]

"The idea of parts of speech is not very useful for English"

I agree that to transfer the Latin categories to English only results in trying to fit square pegs into round holes.

English words are frequently very hard to pin down at all, with the same word often taking on different guises.

But there are new grammars out there that may succeed quite well. I am not up with this sort of thing any more; but applaud any attempt to introduce a bit of fuzzy logic into the description of our grammar.

Was it Sapir who said: "all grammars leak" referring not only to English but to the native American languages he was studying?

harzer

[prawn]

For clarity and for the classroom, try an analysis by using Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL).

Analysis at the Experiential Phase gives us:

Nowhere in the world// is there// a coastline like that one (sic)
CIRCUMSTANCE//EXISTENTIAL PROCESS// EXISTENT

This is but a marked version of the following clause:

There is // a coastline like that one// nowhere in the world (sic)
EXISTENTIAL PROCESS // EXISTENT //CIRCUMSTANCE

which might perhaps also be expressed

There is // no coastline like that // anywhere in the world (sic)
EXISTENTIAL PROCESS // EXISTENT// CIRCUMSTANCE.

The concept of “Subject” occurs at the Interpersonal Phase of analysis, and English is interesting (in my experience) in that it when you do an Interpersonal analysis of clauses involving Existential Processes (ie. Clause Complexes starting with “There is - or any Modal or Tense variant of IS - or involving "is there" such as in the original example) in which “There/ there” is not used deictically, you can only come up with “There/ there” as a possibility for a Subject.

ie
There is // a coastline like that one nowhere in the world
MOOD BLOCK //RESIDUE

Compare Chinese, Indonesian or Thai to English ( you ren; ada orang; mi kon = there is a person) and you can see that the very important Existential Process expressed in English as “there is” is governed by the single morphemes “you”, “ada” and “mi” in the respective languages referred to. Thus it is my contention that the “there is” of an Existential Clause should also be regarded functionally as a unitary morpheme.


Halliday says that “is” is the Process in a clause involving an Existential Process. It might be better to conceive of and explain the Existential Process as being comprised of “There is” (or in the case of the original Clause Complex, “is there”) , and to say that the Subject of an Existential Clause is either inextricably bound to the Process and cannot be separated from the Finite in an Interpersonal analysis, or perhaps even to say that such clauses have no subject at all.

When teaching EFL/ESL, to persist with a parsing grammar and to ignore SFL is akin to using Frankenstein's method of creating new humans instead of the coupling method, and is comparatively about as much use and about as much fun.

[LarryLatham]

I must admit I did not understand what prawn said here. He (she) may have made a valid argument, but not one that I could agree or disagree with because I don't know what it is. I guess I'm out of the loop as regards SFL.

It's an interesting thread, and I've been lurking to see what develops. So far, I'm in the unaccustomed (but not unpleasant) position of agreeing with Stephen Jones. I did understand his argument and don't think it can be brushed aside easily.

Are we choosing sides here?

Larry Latham

[prawn]

Larry,

seeing as you didn't abuse me and you seem interested, I've taken some time to try to elucidate the basic concepts of SFL for you. It does take a little getting used to, but in my experience it is well worth the effort for teachers and students alike.

I hope that I will have succeeded also in clarifying my points with regard to the original questions, and be warned, this is a long one.

SFL recognises 3 distinct primary phases for grammatical analysis of text. The first is what is known as Experiential (or Ideational) Grammar. This has only 3 components: the Process, the Participant(s) and the Circumstance.

The Process is the Verb Group that is involved in the "event" within a clause; the Participant(s) is/are the thing(s) involved, and the Circumstance(s) qualify the Process with respect to a host of factors such as time, place, manner and so on. For example look at the following clause.

I/ 'll call /the girl I met last night /after lunch.
PART./ PROCESS/ PART. / CIRCUMSTANCE

(apologies - i would like to separate the components for clarity but this input method will not allow me to do that, so i am forced to use lines. The divisions of the terminology below the Clause correspond to the divisions of the Clause components above ie.
I (Participant)/ 'll call (Process)/the girl I met last night (Paticipant)/after lunch (Circumstance).)

We can identify 2 Verb Groups in the above Clause ("will call" and "met") but only one ("will call") carries the weight of action or event. The other ("met") only modifies "the girl". Thus "am calling" is identified as the "Process". "I" and "the girl I met last night" are the "things" involved ie. the Participants, and "after lunch", the Circumstance.

("Nowhere in the world" in "Nowhere in the world is there a coastline like that one" is a Circumstance in the role of Theme by the way see below)

Types of Processes include those "purely" related to action (such as "will call" in the above clause) - known as Material Processes - and those involving behaviour ("would be laughing" in the Clause "She would be laughing now" for example)- known as Behavioural Processes. There are several others of course (Verbal, Mental, Relational among them).

The original question (or one part of it anyway) involved what is known in SFL as an Existential Process, which always involves some variant of "there is", where "there" is not used to refer to a place either deictically ("there it is"), or by reference ("London? I've never been there.")

The first of my points is that students need only recognise that this kind of "there is" ("is there" in the original Clause) functions as a unit to comment on the existence (or nonexistence) of something - thus the term "Existential Process".

For example

There are /no keys/ there.
EXISTENTIAL PROC./ PARTICIPANT/ CIRCUMSTANCE

As i said previously, some quarters would regard "are" as comprising the Process. I myself prefer to analyse the Existential Process as consisting of the "there" bit too, because it is my belief that it makes no sense for pedagogy (or anything else for that matter) to excise the "There" of an Existential Process and to try to apply a label to it, because it in itself is only part of the functional unit (ie half of the Experiential morpheme "there is", if i can put it that way), and it is perhaps only through coincidence and/or an accident of tradition that the graphological representation and the phonology of the "there" to which we refer, so closely ( some might say exactly) resembles other morphemes that are used is a deictic or referential sense.

We could in a sense regard "there is/was/has been/could be..."etc etc as the range of conjugations available for the Existential Process in English. There are no symbols and spaces in speech after all, and English graphology is the way it is simply because that it is the way it has developed (is developing), and not because of the grand inevitability of some master plan.

To pull out individual "words" from the graphology and to try to apply labels to them without any consideration of the Clause's functional (thus the F in SFL) composition is a mistake, and is not pedagogically efficient.

To reiterate, Experiential analysis draws the students attention to the event (the Process), the things involved in the event (Participants), and the circumstances (Circumstances) that impinge upon the event as it unfolds. Very importantly it also allows students to begin to discriminate between what is happening (the Process) and Verb Groups that are acting only as modifiers within a clause. If you don't show them this, how are they going to know? Maybe they'll figure it out eventually, but our job is to teach them these things, right?

Having dispensed with the Experiential analysis, we can start on what is known as the Interpersonal analysis. There are 2 main components to the Interpersonal analysis of a Clause: the Mood Block and the Residue (everything that is not in the Mood Block). The Mood Block contains the Subject, the Finite and the Polarity (pos/neg), but perhaps it could be said that the fous of this analysis is on the Finite. In English the Finite expresses either Tense, Modality or perhaps even a bit of both at the same time. (There are some other things that affect the Finite and so can be included in the Mood Block, but let's keep it down to the bare bones here.)

For example:

He was/ eating an apple
MOOD BLOCK/ RESIDUE

The Mood Block is "He was"; Subject is "He" and the Finite is "was", which is a Tense Finite; Polarity is Positive.

At the Interpersonal phase, I analyse the original Clause as follows:

Nowhere in the world/ is there/ a coastline like that one
RESIDUE/MOOD BLOCK/RESIDUE

which, as i said is what one might term a Thematic variant of the Clause

There is/ nowhere in the world a coastline like that one
MOOD BLOCK/ RESIDUE

ie. the Mood Block consists of "is there" ("there is") . I can immediately say that the Mood Block involves a Tense Finite (Present) and that the Polarity is Positive, but defining the Subject is problematic because we cannot detach "There" from "is" or we destroy a functional unit.

One could say that "the universe and everything in it" is the subject, but that might perhaps be waxing a little too metaphysical for the classroom. Thus we can look to Existential Process in other languages in which there is no requirement for a Subject. For example:

ENGLISH: There is/someone/ outside.
CHINESE: Waimian (outside)/you (there is)/ ren (someone)
INDONESIAN: Ada (there is)/ orang (someone)/ diluar (outside)

The Chinese and Indonesian Clauses above are complete and valid, and are also, in my view, patently subjectless (as are similar constructions expressed in other languages with which I am familiar). Thus I prefer to regard Clauses involving the Existential Process in English as having no Subject, and not even one which is implied.

So as regards the original question: There is no Subject in the Clause
"Nowhere in the world is there a coastline like that one", because this is a Clause that involves an Existential Process, and Clauses which involve this type of Process are, by definition, Subjectless.

A bit more re. Interpersonal Grammar: Among other things, the Interpersonal analysis draws the students attention to the way in which "events" can be affected by Modality and Tense, and to the power of the Finite in the English Clause and how its existence or otherwise, and (if it exists) its position relative to the Subject (if there is one) affects the Mood of the Clause (Declarative, Interrogative, Imperative).

(the Existential Process must be seen as a special case, because even though I analyse it as having no Subject, there is still a juxtapositioning of the constituent elements "there" and "is", according to Mood (DEC vs INT) and to accommodate a Circumstance as Theme. I acknowledge that others might take the view that "There" is in fact the Subject, but I will persist in my view.)


Footnote: The next phase of the analysis is that of the Textual Grammar. This invoves 2 major components - Theme and Rheme. The Theme starts at the beginning of the Clause and continues until the the end of the first Experiential Component. Thus

Nowhere in the world/ is there a coastline like that.
THEME / R H E M E

During the analysis of Textual Grammar students attention can be drawn to the fact that there is a continuous thread connecting Themes and Rhemes throughout coherent writing.

eg

Nowhere in the world (THEME)/ is there a coastline like that one (RHEME).||| It(THEME)/ must have been painted from someone's imagination (RHEME).

These 2 Clauses appear coherent and connected because the Rheme of the first appears as the Theme of the second, whereas the following has no Thematic or Rhematic coherence, and therefore is not representative of text (ie. not representative of good writing if you'll allow my gross oversimplifications):

Nowhere in the world (THEME)/ is there a coastline like that one (RHEME).||| I (THEME)/ left my keys at the beach (RHEME)

SFL is not the answer to everything in the classroom of course, but as far as a grammatical description of language goes I have found that it leads to a rapid and radical improvement to the way in which students approach language and particularly written text (hopefully there will be a long term influence on their writing too). Speaking and listening are certainly not exempt from benefit either.

I use the above terminology (and more) in the classroom, and have found that very quickly students stop staring at individual words, and start to break the language up into clear functional units. Among other things, they quickly learn how to discriminate what is happening, who or what is involved, when/where/how etc, the relationship of the Speaker or writer to the Spoken or Written with respect to Time (Tense) and Stand (Modality), and the way in which text develops through the logical progression and development of of Thematic connections, and this even though they might not have developed an understanding of the individual graphemes.

Here's a simple example of what a typical exchange in the classroom is like early in the SFL proceedings.

We are looking at a text, they have found each Verb Group, decided whether each is functioning as a Process or as a modifier, divided the text into clauses, and have decided whether each is Independent, Dependent, Interrupting or Embedded, and whether we are dealing with Finite or Nonfinite Clauses. We are looking at the clause " the cosmologist went to the observatory at 8pm"

ME: Where's the Process?
THEM: "went"
ME: Are there any Participants?
THEM: "the cosmologist"
ME: Are there any Circumstances?
THEM: "to the observatory" and "at 8 pm"
( they get good at this after only a couple of exposures).
ME: What does the Circumstance 'at 8pm' " tell us about?
THEM: The time.
ME: What does the Circumstance 'to the observatory' tell us about ? THEM:its a circumstance of Direction'.
ME: Who or what went where and at what time"
( they tell me immediately).
ME: Does anybody know what a "cosmologist" is, or what an "observatory" is?
THEM: "No".
ME: You've got a dictionary haven't you? Use it.
(...or maybe we'd talk about things related to astronomy for a few minutes, i'm not always so harsh!)

[Harzer]

So as regards the original question: There is no Subject in the Clause
"Nowhere in the world is there a coastline like that one", because this is a Clause that involves an Existential Process, and Clauses which involve this type of Process are, by definition, Subjectless.

Now this is getting somewhere. The reference to Indonesian, Chinese and Thai is quite pertinent to this discussion, as I think was my own mention of several European languages. Allowing there to be "subjectless clauses" is a big step towards a coherent grammar of English.

Well done Prawn.

Harzer

[LarryLatham]

Thank you, prawn, for the considerable effort you put into your post above. You have certainly clarified your earlier post significantly. Of course, in this forum, it is not possible to be comprehensive, and so I find that now I have many new questions. I like what you've done so far, although surely couldn't pretend that I fully understand, so I'd like to ask you if you'd tell us a little more about yourself and the kinds of classes you teach. It feels a bit like you may be teaching university classes in basic linguistics or something of the sort. Are you working in a non-English-speaking country? Are you working with English learners, or with native speakers who need to learn more about how their language works? Are you personally involved in the theoretical development of SFL, or is this something you have come to accept and use in your working life? And, finally, can you direct me (and hopefully others here as well) to where I can find more detail about the theory and practice of SFL?

Thanks.

Larry Latham