Existential Sentences in English (RLE Linguistics D

<p>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 <i>existential sentence</i> (ES) to designate all and only those English sentences in which there appears an occurrence of the unstressed non-deictic 'existential' <i>there</i>. 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. </p>