Bad Subject: (Non-)canonicality and NP Distribution in Existentials

By David I. Beaver, Itamar Francez, D. Levinson. 2005

48 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In section 2 we discuss the relation between existential and non-existential con­ structions and outline an informal theory of pivots based on markedness constraints on subjects. We also present qualitative data from English, Russian and Hebrew that demonstrates systematic variation in pivot properties across languages . In sec­ tion 3, we present quantitative data from a cross-linguistic corpus study, which demonstrates that the distribution of pivots in various languages corresponds to the expectations arising from our theory. Section 4 contains discussion of two phe­ nomena in Russian, the genitive of negation and the optionality of the copula jest ' in present tense locatives and possessives. We show that neither of them involves a distribution like that standardly expected for definiteness effects, but that on our classification the first involves a clear definiteness effect, while the second shows a weaker effect.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, History and Philosophy of Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/bb5164e22296254868c40deda1a2102f4272e306