Existential clause

An existential clause is a clause that refers to the existence or presence of something. Examples in English include the sentences "There is a God" and "There are boys in the yard". The use of such clauses can be considered analogous to existential quantification in predicate logic (often expressed with the phrase "There exist(s)...").

Different languages have different ways of forming and using existential clauses. For details about English, see English grammar: There as pronoun.

Many languages form existential clauses without any particular marker, simply using forms of the normal copula verb (the equivalent of English be), the subject being the noun (phrase) referring to the thing whose existence is asserted. For example, in Finnish, the sentence Pihalla on poikia, meaning "There are boys in the yard", is literally "On the yard is boys". Some languages have a different verb for this purpose, e.g. Swedish finnas, as in Det finns pojkar på gården, which is literally "It is found boys on the yard". On the other hand, some languages do not require a copula at all, and sentences analogous to "In the yard boys" are used. Some languages use the verb have, e.g. Serbo-Croatian, as in U dvorištu ima dječaka, which is literally "In the yard has boys".

Some languages form the negative of existential clauses in an irregular way; for example, in Russian, есть yest ("there is/are") is used in affirmative existential clauses (in the present tense), whereas the negative equivalent is нет nyet ("there is/are not"), used with the logical subject in the genitive case.

In English, existential clauses usually use the dummy subject construction (also known as expletive) with there, as in "There are boys in the yard", although there is sometimes omitted when the sentence begins with another adverbial (usually designating a place), as in "In my room (there) is a large box." Other languages with constructions similar to the English dummy subject include French (see il y a) and German (which uses es ist, es sind or es gibt, literally "it is", "it are", "it gives").

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