Existential Sentences in English [Paperback]

In order to bring some minimal amount of order to the chaos that almost inevitably attends the use of the word existential in a linguistic investigation, the author reserved the term existential sentence(ES) to designate all and only those English sentences in which there appears an occurrence of the unstressed, non-deictic, existential there. Thus the term will be used as a characterisation of a class of syntactic objects, not as a semantic description. With ES sentences including formations such as There were several people talking and There ensued a riot, perhaps nowhere else do we find so clearly displayed the complexity and subtlety of the syntactic and semantic interactions which determine the nature of human language.

Part 1: Do We Have to Have a There-Insertion Rule?  1. ES and the There-Insertion Analysis  2. Emonds Analysis  3. The PS Hypothesis  4. The Cleft Reduction Hypothesis  5. The Loc-Front Proposal  Part 2: What Can Be Done About It?  6. Ontological, Locational, and Periphrastic ES  7. Verbal ES