There did not appear to be...

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There did not appear to be any sign that they were willing to compromise.Is There the existential one in the sentence above?

Englishmaven · Accepted Answer

BillJ · Answer

tkacka15
There did not appear to be any sign that they were willing to compromise. Is There the existential one in the sentence above?

No, it's not an existential clause, but a presentational construction.

Superficially, the presence of "there" appears to indicate that it's an existential. But it's not; there's a difference: Like existentials, presentationals also have dummy "there" as subject, but while existentials have the verb "be" as predicator, presentationals have some verb other than "be". Compare:

There was no sign that they were willing to compromise. [existential]

There did not appear to be any sign that they were willing to compromise. [presentational]

Verbs other than "appear" also occur in the presentational construction, such as "remain" and "seem" and a few others:

There remain only two further problems to resolve.

There seems little doubt that the fire was started deliberately.

There did not appear to be...

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