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.

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.

What is the relationship between the structure of existential sentences and their meaning? How do hearers interpret existential sentences using pragmatic assumptions? This study attempts to account for the relationship between the structure of existential sentences (ES) and their meaning. The study of ES has received a great deal of attention because the construction has complex syntactic properties, is associated with restrictions of a semantic nature, and provides an interesting area for investigation at a pragmatic level.

This book collects some of the most significant articles by Adriana Belletti published over the last ten years or so, offering readers a useful tool to see the mutual enrichment between linguistic theory and experimental studies on (modes of) language acquisition through her work. The volume explores domains of theoretical morphosyntax in the generative tradition and theoretically guided studies on language acquisition. An introduction specific to this volume contextualizes these contributions within ongoing developments in the field. Part I presents studies inspired by the illuminating interchange between linguistic theory and experimentation in the domain of language acquisition, leading to the formulation of explicit research questions tested experimentally and guiding in the proper interpretation of the results. Part II offers refined, detailed theoretical analyses of domains in which peripheral positions in the clause structures are crucially involved to express discourse contents, in sometimes not standard ways during development. Demonstrating how refined linguistic analyses play a crucial role in interpretating the peculiar shape of developmental data, this book will be of interest to scholars in syntax, language acquisition, and theoretical linguistics.

The Representation of(In)definiteness collects the most important current research, reflecting a wide range of approaches, on a central theoretical issue in linguistics: characterizing the distinction between definite and indefinite expressions. The authors of these 11 original essays, which draw on current work in theoretical syntax and semantics, were charged by the editors to take more than usual heed of alternative analyses offered by other theories, thereby promoting cross fertilization of syntactic and semantic ideas, concepts, and argumentation. The project as a whole is grounded in the belief that explicit comparison of seemingly incompatible approaches is essential to improve our understanding of the nature and structure of natural language. Eric J. Reuland and Alice ter Meulen are Professors of Linguistics at the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen and the University of Washington respectively. The Representation of (In)definiteness is fourteenth in the series Current Studies in Linguistics, edited by Samuel Jay Keyser.

This volume explores in detail the empirical and conceptual content of the definiteness effect in grammar. It brings together a variety of relevant observations from a typological, diachronic and a bilingual/second language acquisition perspective, and provides a general overview of different approaches concerned with the syntactic, morphological, semantic, and pragmatic properties of the Definiteness Effect in a series of European and non-European languages.