Existentials and locatives in Romance dialects of Italy

Abstract This chapter discusses various existing definitions of existential sentence or existential construction and introduces the definition adopted in the volume. This is McNally’s (2011) definition, which is enriched with an explicit reference to the context-dependence of existentials. The chapter then outlines the principal semantic and morphosyntactic features of existential and locative there sentences in Romance, and in typological perspective, providing examples of such constructions from a wide variety of languages. It explains the scope and objectives of the volume, alongside the methodology adopted in the Manchester project on existentials, from which the volume stems. It offers a reader-friendly introduction to Role and Reference Grammar, the linguistic framework in which the analysis is couched. The acknowledgements and an outline of the volume conclude the chapter.