Entity- and Event-Existentials in English

It is generally held that existentials are to assert the existence of entities of some kind, and few studies have been conducted to probe into the nature of the existent, or it is just taken for granted that the existent is something. However, in some existentials, the existent is not a thing, but an event or a situation, and thus the existential in question is not to assert the existence of a thing, but the existence or occurrence of an event or a situation. A semantic typology of existentials into entity- and event-existentials has been proposed from a cross-linguistic perspective. This study is to investigate whether this typology applies to English existentials, with reference to their structural types and their analyses in the literature. It is found that the semantic typology may not only be taken as the semantic motivation of the structural typology and the respective syntactic analyses posited in the literature, it also has implications for the semantic issues of the Definiteness Effect and the Predication Restriction. An examination of corpus examples derived from BNC provides further justification for recognizing the two semantic types of existentials in English.