Existential Sentences in English (RLE Linguistics D: English Linguistics), Hardback Book

Existential Sentences in English (RLE Linguistics D: English Linguistics) Hardback

Part of the Routledge Library Editions: Linguistics series

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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.

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