Existential Predication in Natural Languages

Presentation

The articles in this anthology discuss the expression of existential value in different world languages. The universal nature and importance of this question are illustrated by the diverse theoretical approaches used to identify similarities in expression from one language to another.

The book’s originality lies not only in the description of the variety of existential structures, which bear possessive, locative or attributive values, but also in the multiple readings offered.

The book has been arbitrarily split into two parts. In the first part, the articles look at existential predication from a typological point of view, while in the second, an enunciative and pragmatic approach is taken. This division is however rather artificial, insofar as all the authors consider the semantic, syntactic and formal aspects of existential constructions and, in some articles, the contextual parameters, regardless of the language studied. Existential predication is presented by the authors as a specific operation locating one term with regard to another, with an impact on the non-canonical marking of clause constituents, as well as the use of specific existence markers.

Editors

Tatiana Bottineau is a qualified teacher and professor of Russian linguistics at Inalco. She works in formal and enunciative linguistics with a major focus on Russian verb particles considered as discourse markers. 

218 pages
16 x 24 cm
Publication: 20/08/2020
ISBN: 9782858313624