A Student's Introduction to English Grammar

§ 1 Introduction 239

For the passive, there is an established name for the basic counterpart: [lib] is an
active clause. But there is no established name for [iib]: this is simply the non­
extraposition counterpart of [iia]. Similarly, [iiib] is just the non-existential coun­
terpart of [iiia]. And this will be the case with the other constructions we deal with
in this chapter: we have special names for the non-basic constructions, but not for
their basic counterparts.

Exceptional cases without a grammatically well-formed basic counterpart

We said that the non-canonical clauses CHARACTERISTICALLY have syntactically
more basic counterparts. There are exceptions. In some cases the basic counter­
part is in fact ungrammatical. This can arise, for example, with the existential
construction:

[3] EXISTENTIAL

a. There was a bottle of wine on the table.

ii a. There is plenty of time.

NON-EXISTENTIAL

b. A bottle of wine was on the table.

b. * Plenty of time is.

Both versions are permitted in [3i] (or in our original pair [1iii]), but only the exis­
tential version is grammatical in [3ii]. The verb be can't normally occur without an
internal complement, so [3iib] is ungrammatical. There are other cases of this sort,
as we'll see later.

Core meaning and information packaging

The pairs in [1] have the same core meaning in the sense explained in Ch. 13, §4.2:
since they are declarative clauses, having the same core meaning is a matter of
having the same truth conditions. With pair [i], for example, if it's true that her son
was arrested by the police it must be true that the police arrested her son, and vice
versa. And likewise if [ia] is false, [ib] must be false too. The differences have to do
not with the information presented but how it is organised and presented: the two
clauses in each pair PACKAGE THE INFORMATION DIFFERENTLY. We refer collectively
to the passive, extraposition and existential constructions - and others to be intro­
duced below - as information-packaging constructions: they depart from the
most elementary syntactic structure in order to package the information in special
ways. Our major concern in this chapter will therefore be to describe the syntactic
differences between these constructions and their basic counterparts and to investi­
gate the factors which favour or disfavour the use of one of these constructions
rather than the more basic counterpart.

Exceptional cases where the core meanings are different

We have said that clauses belonging to one of the information-packaging construc­
tions GENERALLY have the same core meaning as their basic counterpart: the qual­
ification is needed because there are special factors that can cause a difference in the
core meanings. Consider the following existential/non-existential pair: