Edited by Caroline Gentens, Lobke Ghesquière, William B. McGregor and An Van linden
[Studies in Language Companion Series 230] 2023
► pp. 17–43
This chapter investigates the use of there-clefts without a subject relativizer (e.g. There’s a man came into the bar) in contemporary British English, a much neglected construction that is often dismissed as non-standard. Using data from the Spoken British National Corpus 2014, the study shows that it is clearly attested, with a total of 170 instances, and thus more than just a marginal syntactic anomaly. Omission of the relativizer is most frequent with the presentational-eventive type, which narrowly outnumbers the specificational type (viz. enumerative-specificational and quantifying-specificational). The relative frequency of the former is attributed to its unique pragmatic function, combining a new predication with a new referent. Structurally, this type is analysed as mono-clausal with an invariable existential prefix there’s.