Article

Name: Existence as a Component of Semantics and Communicative Paradigmatic of Existential Sentences

Authors: Ilya M. Plotnikov

Institute of Philology of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Novosibirsk, Russian Federation

Abstract:

This paper examines the use of the term existence in describing semantics and communicative variation of constructions expressing spatial relations. In the first part of the paper, the semantic status of existence is examined, arguing that the senses of existence, contrary to current tradition in Russian linguistics, can be considered separately from the sense of spatial relations. In the second part of the paper, existence is shown to be an obligatory implicit component of all utterances describing specific objects, which can manifest itself as existential presupposition or part of the assertion. In the latter cases, existence can be viewed as one of the components of communicative variation of sentence as a linguistic unit, secondary to its primary meaning. In the third part of the paper, this approach to notion of existence is applied to the analysis of the syntactic structures that expresses spatial relations. A list of main communicative variants of this structure is examined to demonstrate that in every variant the existence of its subject can be represented as a given or new piece of information to the addressee. Three main senses in which existence and location are attested in describing these variants are discussed, including a purely semantic approach, an approach based on the position of rheme in functional sentence perspective, and an approach based on formal variants of the structure. All three approaches lead to different way of categorizing communicative variants while using the same terms, making their use for typological application difficult.

Keywords: existence, location, existential proposition, typical syntactic existential structure, communicative syntax, semantic syntax, pragmatics

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