ABSTRACT
This chapter gives a structure for existential sentences which can explain the definiteness effect taking into account the differences between Italian and English. It proposes the semantic distinction corresponds to two different possible syntactic structures for the noun phrase: a predicate is a PDP, while an argumentai noun phrase is an SDP. In Chomsky, it is proposed that at LF, the subject raises to replace the expletive. In more recent work, "there" is not deleted at LF but the subject raises to adjoin to it. To capture the similarity between the internal noun phrase in ES and predicate nominals. Every good ES-internal noun phrase makes a good predicate nominal, although the converse is not true. One possible explanation for this fact is that the left-dislocated position blocks the possibility of QR/QC which is essential for the interpretation of any purely quantificational SDP.
