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. 


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-------- 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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