Hostname: page-component-74656f9884-8r8nv Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-11-09T07:50:02.976Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Definiteness and the English Existential

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 February 2026

Gregory Ward  and
Betty Birner
Gregory Ward*
Affiliation:
Northwestern University
Betty Birner*
Affiliation:
University of Pennsylvania
*
Gregory Ward, Department of Linguistics, Northwestern University, 2016 Sheridan Road Evanston, IL 60208-4090
Betty Birner, Institute for Research in Cognitive Science, 3401 Walnut St., Suite 400 C University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, PA 19104-6228
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Numerous attempts have been made to place restrictions on the occurrence of formally definite NPs in English existential there-sentences. The wide range of definite NPs found in this construction, however, precludes any (noncircular) characterization of such a definiteness effect based on linguistic form alone. Nonetheless, previous functional analyses of definites in there-sentences have also failed to account for all of the problematic data in a unified way. We present an account of existential there-sentences in which the postverbal NP is required to represent a hearer-new entity; based on a large corpus of naturally occurring data, we identify five types of formally definite yet hearer-new NPs that may felicitously occur in there-sentences. The alleged restriction against definite NPs in there-sentences is shown to be the result of a mismatch between the cognitive status to which definiteness is sensitive and that to which the postverbal position in there-sentences is sensitive.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 71 , Issue 4 , December 1995 , pp. 722 - 742
Copyright
Copyright © 1995 by the Linguistic Society of America

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

Abbott, Barbara. 1992. Definiteness, existentials, and the list’ interpretation. Proceedings of SALT II, ed. by Barker, Chris and Dowty, David, 1–16. Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University.Google Scholar
Abbott, Barbara. 1993. A pragmatic account of the definiteness effect in existential sentences. Journal of Pragmatics 19.39–55.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Belletti, Adriana. 1988. The case of unaccusatives. Linguistic Inquiry 19.1–34.Google Scholar
Birner, Betty. 1994. Information status and word order: An analysis of English inversion. Language 70.233–59.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Birner, Betty, and Ward, Gregory. 1994. Uniqueness, familiarity, and the definite article in English. Berkeley Linguistics Society 20.93–102.Google Scholar
Bolinger, Dwight. 1977. Meaning and form. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Clark, Herbert, and Marshall, Catherine. 1981. Definite reference and mutual knowledge. Elements of discourse understanding, ed. by Joshi, Aravind K. et al., 10–63. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Davison, Alice. 1984. Syntactic markedness and the definition of sentence topic. Language 60.797–846.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Erdmann, Peter. 1976. There sentences in English. Munich: Tuduv.Google Scholar
Freeze, Ray. 1992. Existentials and other locatives. Language 68.553–95.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Guéron, Jacqueline. 1980. On the syntax and semantics of PP extraposition. Linguistic Inquiry 11.637–78.Google Scholar
Gundel, Jeanette. 1974. The role of topic and comment in linguistic theory. Austin, TX: University of Texas dissertation.Google Scholar
Gundel, Jeanette, Hedberg, Nancy; and Zacharski, Ron. 1990. Givenness, implicature, and the form of referring expressions in discourse. Berkeley Linguistics Society 16.442–53.Google Scholar
Gundel, Jeanette, Hedberg, Nancy; and Zacharski, Ron. 1993. Cognitive status and the form of referring expressions in discourse. Language 69.274–307.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hannay, Michael. 1985. English existentials in Functional Grammar. Dordrecht: Foris.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hawkins, John A. 1978. Definiteness and indefiniteness. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press.Google Scholar
Hawkins, John A. 1991. On (in)definite articles: Implicatures and (un)grammaticality prediction. Journal of Linguistics 27.405–42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Holmback, Heather. 1984. An interpretive solution to the definiteness effect problem. Linguistic Analysis 13.195–215.Google Scholar
Jenkins, Lyle. 1975. The English existential. Tübingen: Niemeyer.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kuno, Susumu. 1972. Functional sentence perspective: A case study from Japanese and English. Linguistic Inquiry 3.269–320.Google Scholar
Lakoff, George. 1987. Women, fire, and dangerous things. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Larson, Richard. 1988. Light predicate raising. Lexicon Project Working Papers 27. MIT: Center for Cognitive Science.Google Scholar
Lasnik, Howard. 1992. Case and expletives: Notes toward a parametric account. Linguistic Inquiry 23.381–405.Google Scholar
Lumsden, Michael. 1988. Existential sentences: Their structure and meaning. London: Croom Helm.Google Scholar
Lyons, John. 1977. Semantics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
McNally, Louise. 1992. An interpretation for the English existential construction. Santa Cruz, CA: UCSC dissertation.Google Scholar
Milsark, Gary. 1974. Existential sentences in English. Cambridge, MA: MIT dissertation.Google Scholar
Milsark, Gary. 1977. Toward an explanation of certain peculiarities of the existential construction in English. Linguistic Analysis 3.1–30.Google Scholar
Nunberg, Geoffrey. 1979. The non-uniqueness of semantic solutions: Polysemy. Linguistics and Philosophy 3.143–84.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Penhallurick, John. 1984. Full-verb inversion in English. Australian Journal of Linguistics 4.33–56.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Peirce, Charles S. 1931–58. Collected papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, ed. by Hartshorne, Charles and Weiss, Paul. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Prince, Ellen F. 1981a. On the inferencing of indefinite-this NPs. Elements of discourse understanding, ed. by Joshi, Aravind K. et al., 231–50. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Prince, Ellen F. 1981b. Topicalization, focus-movement, and Yiddish-movement: A pragmatic differentiation. Berkeley Linguistics Society 7.249–64.Google Scholar
Prince, Ellen F. 1981c. Towards a taxonomy of given-new information. Radical pragmatics, ed. by Cole, Peter, 223–56. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Prince, Ellen F. 1986. On the syntactic marking of presupposed open propositions. Papers from the parasession on pragmatics and grammatical theory. Chicago Linguistic Society 22.208–22.Google Scholar
Prince, Ellen F. 1988. The discourse functions of Yiddish expletive es + subject-postposing. IPrA Papers in Pragmatics 2.176–94.Google Scholar
Prince, Ellen F. 1992. The ZPG letter: Subjects, definiteness, and information-status. Discourse description: Diverse analyses of a fundraising text, ed. by Thompson, Sandra and Mann, William, 295–325. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rando, Emily N., and Napoli, Donna Jo. 1978. Definites in there-sentences. Language 54.300–13.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Reuland, Eric. 1985. Representation at the level of logical form and the definiteness effect. Grammatical representation, ed. by Guéron, Jacqueline et al. Dordrecht: Foris.Google Scholar
Guéron, Jacqueline, and Meulen, Alice ter. 1987. The representation of (in)definiteness. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Safir, Kenneth. 1985. Syntactic chains. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Szabolcsi, Anna. 1986. From the definiteness effect to lexical integrity. Topic, focus, and configurationality, ed. by Abraham, Werner and Meij, Sjaan de, 321–48. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Wald, Benji. 1983. Referents and topic within and across discourse units: Observations from current vernacular English. Discourse perspectives of syntax, ed. by Klein-Andreu, Flora, 91–116. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Ward, Gregory. 1988. The semantics and pragmatics of Preposing. New York: Garland.Google Scholar
Ward, Gregory, and Birner, Betty. 1994. English there-sentences and information status. Proceedings of the Ninth Annual Conference of the Israeli Association for Theoretical Linguistics and of the Workshop on Discourse, 165–83.Google Scholar
Ward, Gregory, and Birner, Betty. 1995. On the discourse function of rightward movement in English. Conceptual structure, discourse and language, ed. by Goldberg, Adele. Stanford: Center for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI). to appear.Google Scholar
Wilson, Deirdre, and Sperber, Dan. 1979. Ordered entailments: An alternative to presuppositional theories. Syntax and semantics XI: Presupposition, ed. by Oh, Choon-Kyu and Dinneen, David, 299–323. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Woisetschlaeger, Erich. 1983. On the question of definiteness in ‘an old man's book’. Linguistic Inquiry 14.137–54.Google Scholar
Ziv, Yael. 1982. Another look at definites in existentials. Journal of Linguistics 18.73–88.CrossRefGoogle Scholar