2016年10月21日金曜日

"There is no one compares with you"

One of the Beatles' famous songs, "In my life," goes as follows:
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There are places I'll remember
All my life, though some have changed
Some forever, not for better
Some have gone and some remain
All these places have their moments
With lovers and friends I still can recall
Some are dead and some are living
In my life, I've loved them all
But of all these friends and lovers
There is no one compares with you
And these memories lose their meaning
When I think of love as something new . . .
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Let me focus on the underlined passage "There is no one compares with you."
The sentence seems grammatically inaccurate because it does not have a relative pronoun which refers back to "one," so it should be "there is no one who compares with you."

Yet, the sentence makes perfect sense. Lambrecht observes 10 examples that have the identical construction from a actual conversation:
(1) There was a ball of fire shot up through the seats in front of me.
(2) There's something keeps upsetting him. (Quirk et al. 1972:959)
(3) There's a lot of people don't know that.
(4) Well, I have a friend of mine called me. (Prince 1981:238)
(5) I have one of my uncles was an engineer and he told me ...
(6) A: I thought maybe your grandmother was using the room.
B: No, we had a friend of mine from Norway was staying here.
(7) I have a friend from Chicago's gonna meet me downstairs.
(8) Check to see if your feature matrixes came out OK. I got a couple of' em
didn't come out right.
(9) I have a friend of mine in the history department teaches two courses per
semester.
(10) I have a friend in the Bay Area is a painter. (319)
These sentences occur when "the first clause is either a there-construction of the 'existential' subtype (examples (1) through (3)), or it contains the predicate have (or got), whose subject is a personal pronoun, typically in the first person singular (examples (4) through (10))" (319).

Both "there" and "have" are the contributing factor in making sentences like the passage in In my Llfe.

To be continued. . .

Works Cited:
Lambrecht, Knud. "There Was a Farmer Had a Dog: Syntactic Amalgams Revisited." Proceedings of the Fourteenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society. 1988. 319-39.

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