Existential Sentences
A Linguistic Universal
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 8730116 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Janet B Sawyer (corresponding author), Janet Sawyer |
| Year | 1973 |
| Volume | 48 |
| Issue | 3/4 |
| Pages | 239-239 |
| Publication date | 1973-01-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | American Speech (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0003-1283 • E-ISSN: 1527-2133 |
| Publisher | JSTOR (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/3087831 |
| OpenAlex | W2320103484 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
| References cited | 2 |
According to this analysis, the sentence above is derived from A tiger was in the corral, which has the deep structure form NP + VP. Other examples of sentences that this analysis seems to handle satisfactorily are There is a letter on the table and There will be two cars in every garage. I will presently return to a consideration of such sentences, which I will refer to as type 1. If all existential sentences transformed so easily from one structure to the other, this analysis would be sufficient. However, even the briefest examination of English reveals weaknesses in the analysis. The very suggestion that existential sentences can be accommodated within an analysis of English as transformations of an NP + VP sentence is doubtful, in view of the examples that follow. Not only is the existential sentence a widely used alternative for many other sentence structures, but it is the only possible form for one semantic structure. Actually, the type-1 existential sentence is the only kind that is satisfactorily handled as an optional transformation of an NP 1VP
Epistemology · Existentialism · Linguistics · Discourse Analysis in Language Studies · Natural Language Processing Techniques · Psychology · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation · Philosophy
| Citations per year | 0.07 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 1983 - 2021 (39) |
| Highly cited | No |