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Another look at definites in existentials

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

Yael Ziv
Yael Ziv
Affiliation:
Department of English, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
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Extract

Existential sentences have usually been defined on the basis of their morpho-syntactic characteristics. In English, the term has been used to designate those sentences in which the unstressed, non-deictic there occurs. It has been further observed that most such sentences contain the verb be, an indefinite NP and a locative adverbial following there in that order. Despite this syntactic characterization, however, the term ‘existential sentence’ has been taken, erroneously, to refer to some semantic features of the sentence as well, and so it has been generally assumed that existential sentences always assert the existence of some entity.1

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Linguistics , Volume 18 , Issue 1 , March 1982 , pp. 73 - 88
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1982

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References

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