Existential Sentences Crosslinguistically: Variations in Form and Meaning

Though the term "existential sentence'' goes back at least as far as Jespersen (1924, p. 155) and is used in descriptions of many languages to refer to a designated construction, it is difficult to identify exactly what these constructions have in common crosslinguistically. Following McNally (2011, p. 1829), the term is used here to refer to sentence types that are "noncanonical,'' whether due to some aspect of their syntax or the presence of a distinguished lexical item (e.g., Spanish hay) and that are "typically used to express a proposition about the existence or the presence of someone or something.'' I discuss a representative sample of the different structural resources used to build existential sentences: distinguished existential predicates, on the one hand, and copular, possessive, and expletive or impersonal constructions, on the other. I then address the corresponding variation in the compositional semantics of existentials, as well as pragmatic or discourse functional variation. I contrast the variationist perspective with universalist approaches to existentials, such as that by Freeze (2001).