1st Edition

Existential Sentences in English

By Gary L. Milsark Copyright 1979
    288 Pages
    by Routledge

    270 Pages
    by Routledge

    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

    Biography

    Gary L. Milsark