Can this be considered a complete sentence?
There lived a princess named Gretchen.
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It's "grammatically" valid, but contrary to Louel's assertion, it would almost never appear in that exact form. Fairy tales often start with There once lived a princess named Gretchen (or more likely, There was once a princess named Gretchen).– FumbleFingersCommented Feb 2, 2014 at 21:12
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Complete the limerick: There once lived a princess named Gretchen // Whom all of the princes thought fetchin' … You need the "once"; without it, the meter would be wrong.– Peter ShorCommented Feb 3, 2014 at 2:36
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@FumbleFingers - It's not that uncommon. "there lived a" gets 3.2 million hits at Google Books, compared to 4.2 million for "there was once a" and only 146,000 for "there once lived a".– phenryCommented Feb 3, 2014 at 23:27
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@phenry: If I exclude just the ones preceded by Once [upon a time] there are only 3,790 hits. That's still too many for me to eyeball, but glancing at the first couple of pages I don't see a single one that both starts a sentence with those words and appears likely to be written by a native speaker. I stand by my assertion that OP's sentence is vanishingly unlikely from a native speaker/writer.– FumbleFingersCommented Feb 3, 2014 at 23:52
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"Who lived there?" "There lived a princess named Gretchen." I can find nothing wrong with this syntax or semantics.– Hot LicksCommented Dec 3, 2015 at 20:06
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3 Answers
No. It's ungrammatical.
The rule of There-Insertion requires some adverbial -- of place, time, or circumstance.
Except, let it be said, as usual, with be, which it most commonly occurs with.
There are some common constructional usages with be that don't need adverbials,
e.g:
- Enumerating lists: There's holmium, and helium, and hafnium, and erbium.
- Asserting existence: There is a number which is the square root of -1.
(often with stressed be).
But other There-Insertion verbs like live require an adverbial. That's the function of story-initial phrases like Long, long, ago or Once upon a time or In a castle above the city -- they establish the time, place, or circumstance of the existence.
One could of course say
- A princess named Gretchen lived.
But that's similarly incomplete; put an adverbial in
- A princess named Gretchen lived long, long, ago.
- Long, long, ago, a princess named Gretchen lived.
and it's still weird, because English does not prefer indefinite subjects with existential verbs.
That's what There-Insertion is for; it inserts the dummy subject there.
- Long, long, ago there lived a princess named Gretchen
answered Feb 3, 2014 at 2:21
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2John, that's great and convincing. What's the source for the block quote?– jbeldockCommented Feb 3, 2014 at 4:16
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1I know perfectly well that OP's "sentence" isn't idiomatic, even though superficially it seems grammatical. But it's nice to see that there's a coherent rationale to explain why it's "weird, incomplete". To the extent that anything about English is "rational", I mean. But I suppose it's basically your job to find the bits that make sense (or make sense of the bits, depending on how you look at it). Commented Feb 4, 2014 at 0:00
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1That's Chomsky's claim, not mine. I wouldn't say it was grammatical; I would say it follows syntactic rules mindlessly and meaninglessly. The point of grammar is to help organize meaning; syntax alone is mindless and useless. As to rules being outdated, that happens. In fact, that's most of what we discuss here. Most of the "grammatical rules" cited here are personal opinions, or more often the personal opinions of one's elementary teachers. As P.J. O'Rourke says, "Opinions about grammar are as interesting as opinions about arithmetic." Commented Feb 4, 2014 at 17:29
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1"There lived a lass, and there came a lad, and he loved and rode away" (Jerome K Jerome, Three Men on the Bummel, summarising every European folk song). Commented Jun 18, 2015 at 22:45
Sure. That's how fairy tales often begin.
Structurally, sure. It's the same as saying "Princess Gretchen lived".
The {There} {was/is/exists} {something} structure is usually just a lead-in to a prepositional phrase or subordinate clause, but by definition phrases and subordinate clauses are grammatically optional.
Semantically, you're leaving a big "and then what?" at the end -- but that would normally be a stylistic choice, to draw the reader in.
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Note that if "there" is taken as a noun then the sentence essentially means "In that place lived a princess named Gretchen." Commented Dec 3, 2015 at 20:48