Existential Sentences in English (RLE Linguistics d: English Linguistics) |
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| Author:
| Milsark, Gary L. |
| Series title: | Routledge Library Editions: Linguistics Ser. |
| ISBN: | 978-1-315-85672-8 |
| Publication Date: | Jan 2014 |
| Publisher: | Taylor & Francis Group
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| Imprint: | Routledge |
| Book Format: | Digital (delivered electronically) |
| List Price: | USD $52.95 |
Book Description:
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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...
More Description
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.