Incremental existence: the world according to the Finnish existential sentence

Abstract

This work is a cognitive semantic study on existential constructions in Finnish, the main argument being that existentials code an idiosyncratic, external perspective on the semantic relationships they designate. Unlike nonexistential (transitive and intransitive) sentences, existentials do not assign the status of the semantic starting point to a single participant (typically the referent of the subject), that then steers our perspective toward the other relations designated in the sentence. In existentials, the perspective on the situation remains external to activities and events that take place in the location or other dimension within which the existential relationship is established. Existentials also suppress individual activities and foreground a holistic viewpoint over the event. It is theoretically important that the central differences between existential and nonexistential sentences are not found in the objective semantic content of the sentence construction but rather in the conceptualizer's subjective way of approaching the situation.

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