Existential Sentences In English (Rle Linguistics D: English Linguistics) (Routledge Library Editions: Linguistics)

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.

• | Author: Gary L. Milsark
• | Publisher: Routledge
• | Publication Date: Dec 09, 2015
• | Number of Pages: 272 pages
• | Language: English
• | Binding: Paperback
• | ISBN-10: 1138969281
• | ISBN-13: 9781138969285