ABSTRACT
The core of the analysis is a claim that Existential Sentences (ES) are parallel in structure to cleft sentences and sentences with complement-taking "perception verbs", such as see, hear and feel. Superficially, these three types of sentences show a large degree of parallelism in structure. Jenkins assumes a rule of Cleft Reduction, which is essentially identical to the Wh - be deletion rule proposed for relative clause reduction by Smith. Quite naturally, most of the argumentation has focused on claims about the structure of the coda, since the existence of this structural feature is from one point of view the most striking syntactic fact about ES. ES have passive but not bare active codas exactly because the coda arises from the movement of a noun phrases (NP) around be. Perception verb complements, on the other hand, are generated in place at deep structure as either complement sentences or verb phrases.
