Outline of a theory of existentials on evidence from Romance

Abstract

An existential is the projection into clause syntax of a nominal which is at the same time both an argument and a predicate. Since a nominal, however, lacks overt verbal morphology, it cannot stand as the clause's final predicate: consequently, it is assigned an auxiliary. In fact, the selection of the so called 'existential predicate' - or, more correctly, the finite verb form occurring in existentials, which mostly coincides across languages with an auxiliary - is shown to fall out automatically from the language specific auxiliary selection rule which needs to be established independently for the relevant language. From these basics a number of consequences follow: we provide an explanation for the occurrence of clitic proforms in existentials throughout Romance, for the syntactic essence of the much-debated phenomenon currently labelled 'definiteness effect', as well as for the contrasts between personal vs. impersonal constructions and between existentials and other propositional types (e.g. copular sentences and locative predications).

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