English presentative semantic patterns as seen through a parallel translation corpus

Abstract

The article 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 with a locative subject.

The study demonstrates that the potential of the sentence to introduce a new phenomenon in discourse is primarily based on the semantics of the verb.

Keywords

• presentative semantic pattern
• presentation verb
• locative subject
• local grammar
• Czech/English contrastive approach