The existential verb HABER and the locative verb ESTAR can be used to indicate the presence of a person or thing. But they are seldom interchangeable in Spanish. The subtle differences between these two words can completely change the meaning of a sentence. In concrete, the difference mentioned is that the verb HABER is used to indicate the mere existence of the person or thing. On the other hand, ESTAR is introduced to indicate the location of the person or thing. As a general rule, the locative verb ESTAR is permitted when a specific person or thing is referred to, however the existential verb HABER is used with nouns that can’t have a location. As a result, a noun preceded by a definite article, a demonstrative adjective or a possessive adjective normally would be introduced with the verb ESTAR. The locative verb ESTAR y the existential verb HABER can be used in situations where “to be” is used in English. So they’re usually confusing for students. In this paper, we have argued that the existential verb HABER is derived from the copulative structure. In this point of view, the locative verb ESTAR is defined by the spell-out of the event feature.

The purpose of this study is to find out how the uses of alternating locative verbs have changed in terms of the order between Figure and Ground. As alternating verbs allow the locative alternation by switching the positions of the two arguments, this study focuses only on the argument order. In order to accomplish the purpose, three corpuses are adopted: COHA, COCA and GloWbE. The findings from the collected data reveal the increased or decreased frequency of their constructions, showing which construction has been more frequently used among English users over time. Talmy (2000a) argues that the Figure has syntactic precedence over the Ground in a basic construction. The changing tendency of their uses in alternating locative verbs supports Figure Precedence Principle proposed by Talmy.

I propose that the dative and locative case particles are not postpositions but morphological case markers, quite in contrast to the common view in the literature (Yang 1972, Cho and Sells 1995, and Suh 2013 among many others). I will show the difference between the nominative and the accusative and the dative and the locative in case drop, case stacking, and case spreading is attributed to the fact that the dative case and the locative case are inherent case, as compared with the nominative and the accusative, which are structural case par excellence. The present proposal has a nontrivial implication regarding the other case particles typically argued as postpositions in Korean.