"One way to look at it is to think of the sentence in "normal" word order
-- Three boys were there in the swimming pool."
Not sure that's the same sentence. Doesn't the  *there* in this rewording
function as a true deictic?
*There* in the original "There were three boys in the swimming pool" isn't
truly deictic.
Peter

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On Fri, Jan 12, 2018 at 12:16 AM, jmckibban <
[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> One way to look at it is to think of the sentence in "normal" word order
> -- Three boys were there in the swimming pool.
> In this structure "Three boys" is the complete subject and the rest is the
> complete predicate.
>
>
>
> Sent from my Verizon, Samsung Galaxy smartphone
>
> -------- Original message --------
> From: Scott Woods <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: 1/11/18 6:41 PM (GMT-05:00)
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Question: Complete predicate with "There" expletive
>
> Hi All,
>
> What would you call the complete predicate in the following sentences?
>
> <There were three boys in the swimming pool>
> <There was a man in the tree eating mangoes and dropping the pits on those
> below>
> <There is a house in New Orleans they call the Rising Sun>
>
> The traditional diagramming analysis claims that, since the expletive
> doesn't play a role in the sentence, then the sentence can be rewritten
> without it.
>
> <Three boys were in the swimming pool>
>
> The complete predicate of the original sentence would include the
> adverbial modifiers of the place of existence of the boys.
>
> This seems wrong to me. The sense that I get of the sentence is <Three
> boys in the swimming pool existed>.
>
> The second sentence rewritten according to traditional diagramming would
> be <A man was in the tree eating mangoes and dropping the pits on those
> below>.
>
> The third sentence would be <A house was in New Orleans they call the
> Rising Sun>. This doesn't work because the adjective clause now modifies
> <New Orleans> and not <house>. This would seem to show that the first two
> sentences don't really work in the way that traditional diagramming
> supposes they do.
>
> One purpose of this type of sentence seems to be to give us the ability to
> focus on the subject with its modifiers, to make it clear that we are
> talking about boys in a swimming pool, a man in a tree, or a house in New
> Orleans, with all of their modifiers, that the subject with all these
> attributes exists and not that the subject exists with these attributes.
>
> Thoughts?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Scott Woods
>
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