Present tense verbless sentences involve a full clausal structure and not a reduced structure of the kind familiar under the term small clause . This article presents two new arguments in favor of this view. These arguments are based on differences between root verbless sentences and familiar instances of small clauses (rather than on similarities between present tense verbless sentences and verbal sentences in other tenses, as in Benmamoun 2008). The arguments presented in this article provide substantial evidence bearing on the fundamental issue of what a clausal structure needs to have in order to qualify as an independent nonelliptical utterance.

The relation between expletive there and its associate involves agreement, as suggested in Hazout 2004, and not θ-role assignment, as suggested in Williams 1994, 2006. This difference reflects radically different assumptions about the nature of the subject-predicate relation. The analysis in Hazout 2004 provides a superior account of the empirical facts and affords insights that are missed by the account in Williams 1994.

This article outlines an account of the syntax of existential constructions (e.g., There are [too many problems] ) based on a view of the postcopular NPas a predicate. This NPfigures as the predicate in an embedded clausal complement of be with expletive there as its subject. There consequently moves to the higher Spec, IPposition for Case-theoretic reasons. Existential constructions and existential interpretation are a particular instance of a wider phenomenon involving the use of predicates of various categories with expletive subjects (e.g., It is cold ). Long-distance agreement between the main (inflected) verb and the postcopular NPis a combined effect of the relation of subject-predicate agreement holding between the expletive subject ( there ) and a predicate NPwithin the embedded clausal structure and the relation of specifier-head agreement (feature checking) between the raised expletive and the matrix I/T. This analysis is generalized to other cases of long-distance agreement (e.g., There appeared a man ). It is shown that an analysis based on the notion Agree (Chomsky 2000) is empirically inadequate. Well-known restrictions on the distribution of NPs/ DPs in existential constructions follow from the proposed analysis.