Quick subject question

Question

Sorry for the dumb question, but can someone please explain the subject and verb in this sentence?

"There is a house in new orleans whose veranda is lined with satin"

Answer 1

It is not such a simple question.

"There" is the subject, and "is" is the verb.

I believe those are correct answers, but some will disagree, because there are problems. The "is" is a form of "be" that agrees with a singular subject, and to get "are" here, we'd have to change "a house" to a plural form:

There is a house in New Orleans whose veranda is lined with satin.
There are houses in New Orleans whose verandas are lined with satin.

So "is" apparently agrees in number with "a house", and since number agreement of a verb is with its subject, that argues that "a house" is its subject, rather than "there". Nonetheless, the most popular position among syntacticians is that "there" is the subject of such sentences, for two reasons: (1) subjects come at the beginning of normal declarative sentences, and that is where "there" is -- at the beginning.

And (2), if you compare

There seems to be a house there.
There seem to be houses there.

it becomes obvious that number agreement between "seems" and "house" cannot be due to "house" being the subject of "seems" (since it is not the subject of "seems" in the last examples). So apparently "there" has singular and plural forms, even though the difference is not overt (sort of like "sheep"). Thus, "seems" in your example sentence has singular "there" as subject.

A problem with calling "is" the verb is that it is actually an auxiliary, or auxiliary verb, and in some respects it does not behave like most real verbs. For instance, it is inverted with the subject to form a yes-no question,

Is there a house in New Orleans?

But in current English, this is not allowed for most verbs:

*Built they a house in New Orleans?

Answer 2

Short answer

There is a house in New Orleans whose veranda is lined with satin.

The Subject of this sentence as a whole is the word there. The sentence includes a relative clause:

• whose veranda is lined with satin.

The Subject of this relative clause is the noun phrase whose veranda.

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Full answer

The full answer answer addresses the question of whether and why we should consider the word there the Subject in existential constructions, or if perhaps the noun phrase to the right of the verb BE is the Subject.

Determining Subjects

Now, there are a family of behaviours and attributes that Subjects have that other phrases that make up sentences do not share. We can analyse how closely a particular phrase or word matches these, how similar or dissimilar the behaviour of that phrase is.

When it comes to existential constructions, there are two main theories. By far the most common amongst linguists is that the Subject of existential constructions is the word there. The part of speech of this word is very contentious even amongst linguists, but the fact that it is the Subject of such sentences is not. The word there is unusual because it is usually taken to have no meaning at all. It functions as a dummy Subject in the sentence. It just plugs a gap in the architecture of the sentence by occupying the Subject slot.

The second theory is that the noun phrase to the right of the verb BE in such constructions is actually the Subject. This view is not popular amongst linguists.

The arguments in favour of there

Lets us kick off this investigation by looking at whether the data outside of Subject-verb agreement favours there or the right-hand-side noun phrase as Subject. We'll look at agreement later on. Let's choose two example sentences to begin our investigation:

• There is a banana.
• There are two bananas.

First of all, if we look in the canonical Subject position - just to the left of the verb, we can see that this position is occupied by the word there in each case. This would suggest that the word there might be the Subject.

Now, fully formed declarative sentences in English must have an overtly expressed Subject and an overtly expressed Predicate. These are the two basic building blocks of sentences. We can usually reduce the overt Predicate phrase to a single auxiliary verb. The rest of the material which was in the predicate will be ellipted but will be reconstructable by the listener given the right context:

• My mother can play the guitar whilst spinning plates on her nose.
• No! I don't believe you!
• My mother can!

Here we understand this last sentence like this:

• My mother can [ play the guitar whilst spinning plates on her nose ]!

However, in the shortened sentence in the example, all of those words in brackets are replaced by the small single word Predicate, the auxiliary verb can. This shows that all of these words were in the Predicate in the original sentence and not in the Subject. The Subject in each case is the noun phrase My mother.

Now, let's consider our banana examples:

• There is a banana. There is!
• There are two bananas. There are!

Both of the examples above seem to show that a banana and two bananas are in the Predicate phrases of these sentences, not the Subject phrases. They have both been ellipted in the shorter versions of the sentences. In contrast, we still see the word there in each case. Because every declarative sentence must have both a Subject and a Predicate, by a process of elimination, we can tell that the Subject of each of these sentences is the word there. This confirms the data from the position of there in each sentence.

Another test for Subjects is to see what phrase inverts with the auxiliary verb when we turn the sentence into a yes/no question. Let's see what happens in this case:

• Is there a banana?

So in this case as well, the word there has inverted with the auxiliary is, showing that there is the Subject.

We can also do the question-tag test. The question-tag test involves appending a question tag to the end of the sentence. We can see from the features of the word used in the tag, which phrase in the main clause is the Subject:

• Mary hit Bob, didn't she?

Here she has the gender and number properties we expect in order to reflect the Subject of the main clause Mary. Notice this excludes Bob from being the Subject. If the Subject of the main clause is a pronoun, we expect to see that pronoun in the tag:

• She hit Bob, didn't she?

Let's see what happens if we use a tag with our banana sentences:

• There is a banana, isn't there?
• There are two bananas, aren't there?

Here we see the word there appearing in the tag which shows that it is the Subject in the main clause.

Now, let's look at the "case test". When Subjects have case they are nominative case, not accusative. Now the meaningless word there has no case and neither do the noun phrases a banana or two bananas. But we can use a sentence where the phrase to the right of the verb BE is a pronoun. If that pronoun is accusative, this shows that it is not a Subject. Notice that we cannot use a coordination of pronouns here, because coordinated pronouns often behave strangely in terms of inflection. Ok, let's do the test:

• A: Who is there who can help with the wedding arrangements?
• B: Well, there's me.

Here we see that the pronoun to the right of the verb BE is in accusative case. This seems to show that it isn't the Subject. So by a process of elimination, we are again led to surmise that the Subject is the word there.

All of this evidence shows unequivocally that there is the Subject of these sentences. However, we have not yet considered the data from Subject-verb agreement. This is often taken to support the right-hand-side account.

Subject-verb agreement

The simple data from Subject-verb agreement seems to show the verb agreeing with the right-hand-side noun phrase, which would seem superficially to argue in favour of the right-hand-side noun phrase being the Subject:

• There is a problem.
• There are two problems.

Here we see the verb seemingly inflecting to agree with singular a problem and plural two problems. However, there is also a lot of data which calls this assumption into question. For example, the right-hand-side argument cannot explain data like the followings:

• There's many times I've wanted to box his ears. (plural noun phrase, singular verb)
• There is a bed and a minibar in the room. (plural coordinated noun phrase, singular verb)
• a: Who is there who could help him? b: Well, there is always you. (is does not agree with you)

There is no argument here from the supporters of the right-hand-side account to explain this behaviour of the verb. This kind of data would only seem to be explicable by the there account.

There accounts, such as those given by The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, argue that because there has no features in terms of being singular or plural, it can inherit number features from the right-hand side noun phrase. This is similar to how relative pronouns can, but don't always, inherit number and person features from nouns outside their clauses. In other instances, the verb just defaults to a third person singular value. This is similar to how when clauses or uncountable nouns function as the Subjects of sentences, the verb defaults to third person singular agreement. This would account for each of the three examples above.

Answer 3

I agree with Rob_Ster. You can turn "house" and "there" around: A house is there whose veranda is lined with silk. The subject is house. But the discussion whether "there" is the subject or not is so old that it becomes boring.

In my view the "there" only indicates that the subject is in postposition after the verb. The beginning of a fairy tale is "There was once a king whose daughter was as beautiful as the sun". This is much better than "A king was there ... ". With postponing the subject the suspension is heightened. In version 2 the sentence sounds flat and is without stylistic effect because you blurt the subject and the topic straight out.

I don't use the vague term "expletive there". For me it is a marker for subject inversion in a special sentence type, and, of course, it is the normal adverb of place and not a pronoun.

Answer 4

The subject is house, and the verb is is. The dependent clause introduced by whose modifies house.

There is the confusing element. It looks like it wants to be some kind of pronoun - which it isn't - and in other circumstances it really is an adverb (The stuffed wombat is over there.)

Here, there is something else: it's an expletive. For an explanation in detail, check out the web site Grammar Revolution. Here's how they present a famous "there is..." sentence in a Reed Kellogg diagram:

Thanks in part to the Nixon tapes and their infamous [deletions], the term expletive enjoys an unsavory reputation. However, in. grammatical usage, it's something else entirely.