The Big Mess Construction Straightened Out

Unfortunately, little attention has been paid to the Big Mess Construction (BMC) among researchers of theoretical linguistics for the past one and half decades. The BMC, however, deserves much consideration and study since it exhibits syntactic and semantic idiosyncratic features. Therefore, this paper addresses the following two aims: (i) to examine previous analyses of the BMC within the frameworks of the Minimalist Program (MP) and Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) pointing out their contributions and problems, and (ii) to show that the BMC and the existential there-construction share two properties, implication of contrast and new information, both of which were not acknowledged in previous analyses.