Patterns of variation in existential constructions

Abstract

The main goal of the present paper is twofold: on the one hand, to highlight the patterns of variation among the existential constructions found in Italo-Romance; on the other, to examine the observed microvariation in a comparative perspective in order to identify common properties and general tendencies. Starting from a description of the variation concerning the primary components of existentials, I demonstrate that, irrespective of the superficial morphosyntactic variation attested, all Italo-Romance existential constructions share a fundamental property: their distinguishing features can all be viewed as the reflection of the persistence of formal properties continuing or overlapping with a source construction. This construction is either the locative predication, when be is selected, or the possessive structure, when the existential copula is have. The pivot of the existential construction therefore shows typical properties of arguments, but is however subject to a high degree of instability and variation because it has been semantically reanalysed as the predicate of an abstract contextual domain serving as the argument of the existential proposition. This mismatch between the syntactic and the semantic characteristics of existential structures contributes to the microvariation encountered.

Non-prototypical clefts

“…The copular clause systematically contains the copula be. The existential construction, however, exhibits a high degree of variation (see Cruschina 2014Cruschina , 2015aBentley, Ciconte and Cruschina 2015;;Bentley and Cruschina 2016). This variation relates not only to the presence or absence of a proform, but also to the choice of the verbal copula used to express existential propositions, which can be an outcome of Latin ESSE 'be' or HABERE 'have', but also of STARE 'stand' in some dialects.…”

“…Following the traditional terminology in the relevant literature, I use 'pivot' for the nominal constituent that describes the entity whose existence or presence is asserted or denied in an existential sentence, and 'coda' for the constituent that usuallyalbeit not necessarilyfollows the pivot, such as the locative phrase in (1) (see, e.g., McNally 2011). The syntactic encoding of the pivot varies crosslinguistically, insofar as it may display subject or object propertiesor even a mix thereofdepending on the language (seeLambrecht 2001;McNally 2011;Cruschina 2015a;Bentley and Cruschina 2016).…”