A situation semantic account of existential sentences.

摘要

This dissertation investigates the semantics of English there existential sentences. By examining discourse function and pragmatic facts, it accounts for semantic facts which have not been discussed elsewhere. Theoretically, it is a new attempt to incorporate information-theoretic notions into formal semantics.; The examination of a large collection of examples gathered from various corpora reveals that existential sentences and subject-predicate sentences without there are used in different contexts. While subject-predicate sentences can be used to make a categorical statement about the entity denoted by the subject NP, existential sentences can only be used to make a thetic statement which does not involve predication of a sentence topic, and moreover, they have a presentative function.; I propose that existential statements present a situation, and I analyze them in Situation Semantics as expressing Austinian propositions. The post-copular NP and coda predicate are together analyzed as forming a fact which is made true in the presented situation. Categorical subject-predicate statements, by contrast, are analyzed as expressing Russellian propositions about their topic. Such a fine-grained analysis of the propositional content of existential and subject-predicate statements correctly reflects their difference in information articulation.; The proposed meanings account for the fact that indefinite subject NPs but not post-copular NPs can constitute the restriction of an adverb of quantification, have scope over negation, and admit a partitive reading. Furthermore, the proposed semantic analysis derives the Predicate Restriction of existential sentences.