Existential Sentences in English (RLE Linguistics D: English Linguistics)

In order to bring some minimal amount of order to the chaos that almost inevitably attends the use of the word ΓÇÿexistentialΓÇÖ 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, ΓÇÿexistentialΓÇÖ 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 ΓÇÿThere were several people talkingΓÇÖ and ΓÇÿThere ensued a riotΓÇÖ, 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.