There have been three main proposals regarding to the structure of the English existential construction: small clause, bare-NP, and ternary analysis. Each has some merits in accounting for its syntactic properties, but at the same time leaves out certain empirical issues unaccounted for. This paper critically reviews these three previous analyses and offers a hybrid analysis that allows both the bare NP as well as small clause structure for the construction. We sketch this hybrid analysis within a Construction Grammar perspective.

• Jong-Bok Kim(Kyung Hee University)