On the Syntactic Structure of the Presentational Amalgam Construction

This paper concerns the syntactic structure of what Lambrecht ( 1988 )has called the presentational amalgam construction ( PAC) exemplified by Thereʼ s a woman lives in China.We review Dohertyʼ s ( 1993 ) relative clause analysis of PAC which was recently supported by Haegeman et al. ( 2015 ), who argue that the underlined part lives in China is a relative clause.We identify several empirical problems with the analysis and show that these are accommodated under Harris and Vincentʼ s (19 80 ) " particle"analysis according to which the underlined part lives in China and the preceding NP a woman form a simple clause to which thereʼ s is adjoined as an existential" particle."Moreover,we discuss several problems with the" particle"analysis and demonstrate that the analysis is improved if we adopt a more articulated CP structure for the left periphery (Rizzi1 997).Specifically,we propose a syntactic structure for PAC in which the subject a woman moves from Spec-TP into Spec-FocusP to mark it as focused and thereʼ s houses TopP.We show that our analysis can account for a range of facts that are not captured under earlier analyses of PACs.