Can this be considered a complete sentence?
There lived a princess named Gretchen.
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It's "grammatically" valid, but contrary to Louel's assertion, it would almost never appear in that exact form. Fairy tales often start with There once* lived a princess named Gretchen* (or more likely, There was once* a princess named Gretchen*). – FumbleFingers Feb 02 '14 at 21:12
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Complete the limerick: There once lived a princess named Gretchen // Whom all of the princes thought fetchin' … You need the "once"; without it, the meter would be wrong. – Peter Shor Feb 03 '14 at 02:36
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@FumbleFingers - It's not that uncommon. "there lived a" gets 3.2 million hits at Google Books, compared to 4.2 million for "there was once a" and only 146,000 for "there once lived a". – phenry Feb 03 '14 at 23:27
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@phenry: If I exclude just the ones preceded by Once [upon a time] there are only 3,790 hits. That's still too many for me to eyeball, but glancing at the first couple of pages I don't see a single one that both starts a sentence with those words and appears likely to be written by a native speaker. I stand by my assertion that OP's sentence is vanishingly unlikely from a native speaker/writer. – FumbleFingers Feb 03 '14 at 23:52
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"Who lived there?" "There lived a princess named Gretchen." I can find nothing wrong with this syntax or semantics. – Hot Licks Dec 03 '15 at 20:06
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@HotLicks: the semantics are wrong, aren't they? The actual sentence called for is "A princess named Gretchen lived there," and the inversion changes the meaning. – herisson Dec 03 '15 at 20:37
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@sumelic - How does it change the meaning? – Hot Licks Dec 27 '16 at 22:41
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@HotLicks' example is kind of a pun. If you get the intonation right, it's okay with "there" in the sense of "in that place (pointing to it)". But the question is really about the expletive "there" of "There are fairies at the bottom of my garden." – Greg Lee Dec 27 '16 at 22:42
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No. It's ungrammatical.
The rule of There-Insertion requires some adverbial -- of place, time, or circumstance.
Except, let it be said, as usual, with be, which it most commonly occurs with.
There are some common constructional usages with be that don't need adverbials,
e.g:
- Enumerating lists: There's holmium, and helium, and hafnium, and erbium.
- Asserting existence: There is a number which is the square root of -1.
(often with stressed be).
But other There-Insertion verbs like live require an adverbial. That's the function of story-initial phrases like Long, long, ago or Once upon a time or In a castle above the city -- they establish the time, place, or circumstance of the existence.
One could of course say
- A princess named Gretchen lived.
But that's similarly incomplete; put an adverbial in
- A princess named Gretchen lived long, long, ago.
- Long, long, ago, a princess named Gretchen lived.
and it's still weird, because English does not prefer indefinite subjects with existential verbs.
That's what There-Insertion is for; it inserts the dummy subject there.
- Long, long, ago there lived a princess named Gretchen
John Lawler
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2John, that's great and convincing. What's the source for the block quote? – jbeldock Feb 03 '14 at 04:16
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1I know perfectly well that OP's "sentence" isn't idiomatic, even though superficially it seems grammatical. But it's nice to see that there's a coherent rationale to explain why it's "weird, incomplete". To the extent that anything about English is "rational", I mean. But I suppose it's basically your job to find the bits that make sense (or make sense of the bits, depending on how you look at it). – FumbleFingers Feb 04 '14 at 00:00
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@FumbleFingers You got it. Patterns is what linguists are trained to find, and linguistic rules are nothing more than consistent patterns. That's all I've been talking about on ELU.se and Ling.se, really. – John Lawler Feb 04 '14 at 03:11
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Well, people are always citing colourless green ideas... as an example of a "grammatical" hypothetical utterance. Personally, I'd say that one can be dismissed purely on semantic grounds. It's not so obvious why OP's example isn't a "credible utterance" (to the likes of me, anyway). But I kinda take it for granted any "grammar" that doesn't rule out constructions native speakers wouldn't accept must in some sense be an incomplete grammar. I think when you say "grammatical" you really mean "acceptable to the natives", not "conforming to a (possibly outdated/incomplete) set of rules". – FumbleFingers Feb 04 '14 at 13:34
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1That's Chomsky's claim, not mine. I wouldn't say it was grammatical; I would say it follows syntactic rules mindlessly and meaninglessly. The point of grammar is to help organize meaning; syntax alone is mindless and useless. As to rules being outdated, that happens. In fact, that's most of what we discuss here. Most of the "grammatical rules" cited here are personal opinions, or more often the personal opinions of one's elementary teachers. As P.J. O'Rourke says, "Opinions about grammar are as interesting as opinions about arithmetic." – John Lawler Feb 04 '14 at 17:29
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1"There lived a lass, and there came a lad, and he loved and rode away" (Jerome K Jerome, Three Men on the Bummel, summarising every European folk song). – Tim Lymington Jun 18 '15 at 22:45
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Structurally, sure. It's the same as saying "Princess Gretchen lived".
The {There} {was/is/exists} {something} structure is usually just a lead-in to a prepositional phrase or subordinate clause, but by definition phrases and subordinate clauses are grammatically optional.
Semantically, you're leaving a big "and then what?" at the end -- but that would normally be a stylistic choice, to draw the reader in.
AmeliaBR
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Note that if "there" is taken as a noun then the sentence essentially means "In that place lived a princess named Gretchen." – Hot Licks Dec 03 '15 at 20:48