Definiteness, Existentials, and the 'List' Interpretation

Existentials as Existentials:

The common view in the literature is that the post-verbal NP of an existential construction cannot be interpreted as the topic of its sentence, where the term “sentence topic” is construed as an expression forming a relation of aboutness between itself and the clause in which it appears. The aim of this paper is to refute this claim. First, we discuss why the discourse functions associated with...

Existentials, predication, and modification

This paper offers a new semantic theory of existentials (sentences of the form There be NPpivot XPcoda) in which pivots are (second order) predicates and codas are modifiers. The theory retains the analysis of pivots as denoting generalized quantifiers (Barwise and Cooper 1981; Keenan 1987), but departs from previous analyses in analyzing codas as contextual modifiers on a par with temporal/loc...

Bounded Existentials and Minimal Typing

We study an extension of the second-order calculus of bounded quantiication, System F , with bounded existential types. Surprisingly, the most natural formulation of this extension lacks the important minimal typing property of F , which ensures that the set of types possessed by a typeable term can be characterized by a single least element. We consider alternative formulations and give an alg...

Event Existentials in Tagalog

This paper proposes an analysis of a relatively under described existential construction in Tagalog. This construction at first glance appears to embed a relative clause under the existential predicate. However, it differs from this type of existential in two crucial respects. The complement of the existential verb allows extraction, demonstrating that it is not a DP. Additionally, rather asser...

Irish Existentials in Context