Chapter 4. Pure existentials vs. pure presentationals

Abstract

Existential constructions are usually defined as sentences in which an entity is associated with some location. In the paper, a semasiological approach is adopted, which is essentially constructional in nature and assumes that existential constructions result from the grammaticalization of other (more basic) source constructions. This allows us to show that in spite of the basic nature of the spatial dimension, other source constructions are possible which are not directly based on space. They can be contrasted with pure presentationals which in a way represent their conceptual counterpart in the sense that the existence of the entity involved is presupposed only with regard to the specific utterance and is not independently established in the spatial dimension.