The covert perceiver in English Locative Inversion: an alternative to expletive pro
Benjamin L. Sluckin
March 2025 

Locative Inversion (LI) in English is a broad-focus inversion structure in which a spatiodeictic XP seemingly occupies the canonical subject position. An analysis of LI must explain EPP-satisfaction: previous approaches take either a silent expletive pro (Bruening, 2010; Coopmans, 1989; Postal, 2004) to value EPP or they consider the locative element to do so like expletive there. Indeed, LI resembles inversion under there, showing pragmatic, lexical-semantic, and syntactic restrictions, being limited mostly to unaccusatives of speaker-directed movement/orientation, while verbs of disappearance or change-of-state are largely unacceptable. However, unlike inversion under there, LI does not trigger definiteness effects which are associated with expletives. Moreover, LI is incompatible with negation, do-support and the present perfect. We propose that LI is an inherently evidential construction. This behaviour results from an EPP-satisfying logophoric covert perceiver argument dubbed Exploc (Sluckin, Cruschina & Martin, 2021) which provides an alternative to the typologically anomalous expletive pro. Exploc moves from a vP-internal position scoping over a Small Clause to Spec,TP and is licensed only by contexts and verbs which can presuppose a perception event on the part of a perceiver. This explains previous observations that LI involves a visual experiential component (Breivik, 1989; Brinton & Stein, 1995). Importantly, Exploc derives known pragmatic and lexical-semantic restrictions on LI, e.g., no disappearance unaccusatives, negation (which negates a perceivable event), and the English present perfect which is infelicitous in reports of direct perception. Furthermore, we show that all unergative verbs participating in LI are coerced into an unaccusative structure.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/008638 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	Evolutionary Linguistic Theory
keywords:	locative inversion, expletives, evidentials, english, epp, semantics, syntax
previous versions:	v1 [July 2024]
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