A Semantics for the English Existential Construction

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Proposes a new semantics for English statements beginning with "there," which adopts the generally rejected characterization of them as subject-predicate prepositions in which the subject is a property or description of an individual and the predicate affirms the instantiation of the property of description. Develops the interpretation of the construction in both a property-theoretic semantics and a version of File Change Semantics, and includes a complete syntactical analysis. Defends the new approach as more successfully at handling certain problematic data, capturing similarities between existential and copular sentences, and predicting cross-linguistic variation in the definiteness effect. Revised from a dissertation for the University of California, Santa Cruz, 1992. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.