Relation between "Behind the painting was a secret door" and "There was indeed a secret door"

What is it about?

The paper has a fourfold aim: (1) to explore the inner cognitive structure of full-verb inversion (FVI) in English by applying Langacker’s semiological principle to this type of sequence, and particularly to cases showing lack of subject-verb agreement such as In the centre of the page is two houses; (2) to critically examine the claims made about FVI by Chen, notably the Invertability Hypothesis and the claim that the preverbal element is in focus; (3) to bring to light significant parallels between FVI and existential constructions introduced by there; and (4) to discuss whether FVI constitutes a construction in Goldberg’s sense of the term.

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Why is it important?

This study builds on Chen’s (2003, 2011, 2013) analysis of full-verb inversion (FVI) and existentials. Attention is given to two characteristics of these constructions not discussed by Chen – lack of subject-verb agreement and pronominal forms. Further parallels between FVI and existential there are brought to light concerning the type of predicate, negation, transitivity, agreement, presentational function, pronominal forms and postverbal NP heaviness. The cognitive structure of FVI with no S-V concord is argued to be: (1) ground-setter, (2) verb heralding presence/appearance of generic third-person figure, (3) nominal identifying generic figure. Chen’s Invertability Hypothesis is shown to generate false predictions with fronted adjectives and adverbials, and the claim that the preverbal element is in focus is shown to be problematic due to its ‘given’ information status. FVI is argued to not fully qualify as a Goldbergian construction, as it is not a meaning-form pairing independent of the lexical items instantiating it.