ABSTRACT
Lyle Jenkins offers an elegant account of English Existential Sentences (ES) which seems at first glance to accomplish the difficult and desirable feat of accounting for a range of syntactic phenomena about ES more adequately than does the there-insertion analysis and doing it with less powerful means. The most fundamental of these is also most obvious: if the PS Hypothesis is correct, the coda is always a noun phrase (NP): therefore it should be the case that anything which can appear to the right of be in ES is independently generable as an English NP. To a large extent this claim appears to be correct, and it allows Jenkins to explain immediately two of the more awkward gaps in what should, according to the there-insertion theory, be the ES paradigm: the Predicate Restriction and the Semi-modal Restriction. One such argument concerns well-known fact that English non-stative verbs not appear in the simple present tense, except in nomic or habitual readings.
