FG and the dynamics of discourse 231are thereby unexpected in their discourse role as point of departure, creat-
ing an effect of emotivity, typically over major discourse shifts. This effect
is also contributed to by the marked position of the Subject, which is
thereby signalled to be unexpected as well: in principle some other poten-
tial referent would have been more likely or expected. The Subject referent
does not need to be ‘brand new’, but merely less salient/familiar than the
fronted element. The presentative nature of inversions resides in their fore-
grounding of the speaker’s syntactic point of departure, which (a) usually
receives intonational prominence (ContrFoc),^18 (b) precedes a clausal pre-
supposition, and (c) serves a variety of communicative purposes (viz. to
solve problems of encoding, to act as a spatio-temporal framework-setting
device for the introduction of new participants in discourse, to establish a
cohesive tie, or to create an effect of emphasis). These wide-ranging dis-
course functions make inversions particularly appropriate for literary styles
or for relatively vivid accounts of an event, as well as for expository and
argumentative discourse, in which case their role is normally to contribute
to the scaffolding of the S’s explanation or argumentation.
Alternatively, existential-there constructions lack a presupposition of
existence and, in the unmarked cases, place in P1 a Stager, i.e. a scene-
setting spatial or temporal adverbial, which acts as a presentative device
which, in combination with BE or another existential verb, creates an exis-
tential/presentational framework, bringing to the rhematic zone a (lexically
and informatively) ‘heavier’^19 Existent that receives focal prominence
(UttFoc), as dictated by the principles of End Focus and End Weight. This
array of information contributes to facilitating the processing of there-
constructions: placed last, heavy rhematic constituents do not disturb the
processing of the thematic part, which at the same time provides an exis-
tential-presentational framework for grounding the most informative
material. Generally, the point of introducing this informative material (the
Existent) by means of a there-construction is to develop it as local D-Topic
over the ensuing discourse span(s).
Because of their functional features, there-constructions are particularly
suited for informative and descriptive discourse seeking spatio-temporal
locations for focal or discourse-prominent information (entities and situa-
tions). The side-effect is often to silence the agency of a State of Affairs,
imbuing these constructions with a depersonalized quality, and thereby
permitting speakers to avoid claims about the responsibility for the asser-
tion in question, a precondition of objective discourse. In keeping with this,
existential-there constructions are, for processing reasons, scarce in active
dialogic discourse. The notional Subject is delayed until the end of the con-