Existential Sentences in English - 9781138969285

Name: Existential Sentences in English - 9781138969285
Brand: Taylor & Francis

Taylor & Francis

Existential Sentences in EnglishAuthor(s): Gary L. Milsark\nFormat: Paperback\nPublisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd, United Kingdom\nImprint: Routledge\nISBN-13: 9781138969285, 978-1138969285\nSynopsis\nIn 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.