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Title:
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An Interpretation for the English Existential Construction
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Author:
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Louise McNally
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Email:
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click here to access email
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Homepage:
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http://www.upf.edu/dtf/personal/louisemcnally
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Degree Awarded:
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University of California, Santa Cruz
, Department of Linguistics
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Degree Date:
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1992
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Linguistic Subfield(s):
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Semantics
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Subject Language(s):
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English
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Director(s):
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William Ladusaw
Sandra Chung
Donka Farkas
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Abstract:
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This dissertation proposes an interpretation for the English "There"-existential construction on which the construction expresses a property not of an "ordinary" individual, but rather of a description of an individual (formalized as a nominalized function, Chierchia 1984). This property holds of a description at some index iff the description is instantiated by some individual in its extension at that index. An additional felicity condition is posited requiring that the instantiating individual correspond to a novel discourse referent. Thus, unlike most previous proposals, the anlaysis advocated here takes the predicative phrase often found in existential sentences (e.g. "available" in "There was help available") to be an adjunct, rather than a (part of a) complement to the existential predicate.
Chapter 2 discusses the syntax of the construction and presents arguments for treating the final phrase as an adjunct.
A property-theoretic interpretation for the construction is developed in Chapter 3. There, the analysis is shown to make superior predictions concerning, inter alia, the scopal and relativization properties of the postcopular determiner phrase (DP) and to capture similarities between the DP in the existential and the predicate nominal. The definiteness effect associated with the construction is argued not to be a unitary phenomenon: A DP may be excluded from the construction because it fails to denote a nominalized function (e.g. "each student") or because its felicity conditions conflict with the novelty condition imposed by the construction (e.g. "the student").
In Chapter 4, the optional predicative phrase is argued to have the same interpretation as a depictive/circumstantial adjunct; consequently, the chapter begins by presenting an interpretation for depictives and circumstantials. The restriction governing possible final phrases in the existential is shown to reduce to a restriction governing these adjuncts in general. Chapter 4 concludes with an analysis of "eventive" existentials (e.g. "There has been a man shot") on which "a man shot" is argued to be a DP, contra e.g. Milsark 1974 but in accord with e.g. Williams 1984.
Finally, Chapter 5 briefly discusses the predictions of the proposal for data including "list" existentials and "presentational-there" sentences.
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