Presentational Sentences in Catalan Dialects

Based on data from surveys, this paper offers a contrastive description of presentational sentences in Catalan dialects. Drawing on functional grammar and cognitive linguistics, we attempt to show the basic characteristics of presentational as opposed to locative sentences, considering that the so-called definiteness effect is not valid for Catalan. We note that there are three verbs which may appear in presentational contexts: haver-hi, ésser-hi (or ser-hi) and estar(-hi), and that their distribution is not always alike in all Catalan dialects. In fact, distribution depends to a great extent on the degree of definiteness of the NP. With the definiteness hierarchy as our basis for analysis, we have determined which verbs appear in the most prototypical presentational contexts, and which in more peripheral ones. In addition, we have found that distributional boundaries for the verbs examined are not always clear cut