English Locative Inversion: A Constraint-Based Approach

English locative inversion (LI) constructions exhibit various intriguing properties. Central concern includes how to capture the mixed properties of the preverbal PP and the postverbal NP: the preverbal PP functions both as a subject and topic, while the postverbal NP has subject and focus properties at the same time. Departing from configurational approaches (Newmeyer 1987, Coopmans 1989, Hoekstra and Mulder 1990, Rochemont and Culicover 1990, among others), this paper attributes such intriguing and mixed properties of the constructions to the interaction of enriched lexical information of the lexemes occurring in LI and construction-specific constraints. In particular, the paper claims that LI is a result of different mapping relations among grammatical function structure (valence structure), argument structure, and discourse structure. In particular, the information structure in which the locative PP carries topic and the theme represents focus in a sense triggers the PP to be realized as syntactic subject and the NP to be object. Together with such a mapping constraint, the paper shows that constraints on the phrase locative-inv-ph and its supertypes, whose existence is independently motivated by English grammar, play crucial roles in accounting for phenomena such as freezing effects.