ABSTRACT
The aim of this chapter is to introduce the distinction between strong and weak quantifiers, and the Definiteness Effect (DE) in Existential Sentences (ES). After giving a survey of some analyses that have been offered to explain this phenomenon, I lay down two desiderata for a correct account of ES, which is developed in subsequent chapters. One is to explain why there appears to be crosslinguistic variation in the definiteness effect. "There is John" is out in English, but its word-by-word translation in Italian is impeccable; if the DE is solely driven by semantic factors, as proposed by some authors, we wouldn't prima facie expect such differences.
