ABSTRACT
This chapter attempts to develop a theory which accounts in an insightful way for a number of semantic and syntactic peculiarities of those classes of Existential Sentences (ES) which crucially involve the occurrence of the verb be. The term " ES" is used in linguistic investigations with certain vagueness both in import and extension. An account of ES containing a rule of interpretation like is able to provide a means of blocking the ungrammatical source sentences of ontological ES, provided one makes a particular assumption. The system which results fits well into a linguistic theory incorporating quite severe restrictions on the notion of possible syntactic rule, due to its use of independently necessary generalizations about meaning to remove the large number of unprincipled restrictions and special statements which are usually assumed to be necessary in a movement analysis of ES.
