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The Topic Is ‘There’
Author(s) -
Basilico David
Publication year - 1997
Publication title -
studia linguistica
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.187
H-Index - 28
eISSN - 1467-9582
pISSN - 0039-3193
DOI - 10.1111/1467-9582.00023
Subject(s) - definiteness , quantifier (linguistics) , predicate (mathematical logic) , linguistics , sentence , copula (linguistics) , existentialism , dependent clause , computer science , complement (music) , subject (documents) , natural language processing , mathematics , philosophy , programming language , biochemistry , chemistry , phenotype , epistemology , complementation , library science , gene
This paper claims that the appropriate associate for ‘there’ is the small clause complement to the copula. It is argued that ‘there’ acts as a topic quantifier and that the small clause acts to provide a restriction for this topic quantifier. Furthermore, the SC in a ‘there’ existential sentence is licensed not by the T 0 head of Tense but by the D 0 of the expletive ‘there’. This approach is able to explain several puzzles associated with ‘there’ existential sentences, including the predicate restriction, the definiteness effect, and the contradictory subject (agreement) and object (extraction, scope) properties of the postcopular NP.