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In:The Ziggurat of Grammar: In honor of Ur Shlonsky
Edited by Lena Baunaz, Giuliano Bocci and Andrew Nevins
[Language Faculty and Beyond 20] 2025
► pp. 416–437

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Chapter 20
Existentials

The view from Afroasiatic

 | University College Dublin
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.

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Published online: 13 November 2025
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https://doi.org/10.1075/lfab.20.20ouh
Abstract
This article explores the existentials of selected Afroasiatic languages that collectively provide evidence for a compositional main predicate that consists of an existential operator and a substantive component in the shape of a Stage-Level predicate. The existential operator is typically spelled out with ‘some’ and the Stage-Level predicate with deictic ‘there’ and ‘in-it’ with a spatiotemporal semantic content rooted in their structure in the shape of the silent compound SPACE-TIME. The Stage-Level predicate can also be spelled out with stative passive ‘be.found’ with the meaning ‘exist’. The languages discussed include Arabic, Berber and South Arabian.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Predicational locative sentences
  • 3.The THERE-existential
  • 4.Predicative THERE vs. subject THERE
  • 5.Deictic THERE vs. deictic demonstrative THERE and HERE
  • 6.The IN-IT-existential
  • 7.The SOME-existential vs. the BE.FOUND/EXIST-existential
  • 8.Summary and conclusions
  • References
References (42)
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