ABSTRACT
This chapter inspects the LOC-front analysis of English Existential Sentences (ES) proposed in Kuno, which was taken as typical of a number of similar proposals under which the occurrence of the formative there in ES is regarded as evidence that all such sentences are syntactically related to sentences of non-ES form containing locatives. It was shown that Kuno's argumentation fails to establish his thesis that existential there is a syntactic remnant of a locative constituent. In recent years there have appeared a number of proposals like Kahn, Fillmore, Lyons, Kuno, Kimball whose common property is an attempt to explain certain characteristics of ES by postulating a syntactic relationship between ES and some non-ES structure crucially containing a locative. The analysis of English ES found in Kuno is actually part of the more ambitious undertaking of attempting to motivate a universal claim about the structure of ES in natural language.
