Johnson 2004 - CDLI - UCLA

In the case of an existential sentence, the speaker does not include him- or herself in the
utterance at all, since the claim is that the state of affairs exists quite independently of the
person who is uttering the statement. In a certain sense, existential sentences are the
inversion in pragmatic terms of so-called explicit primary performatives as in (8).
(8) I promise to bring the book to class tomorrow.
Although both (7) and (8) necessarily involve a speaker who is making an assertion of
one kind or another, in (7), there is no element of the sentence that refers to the speaker
and in fact there is no referential noun phrase in the nominative position before the verb.
The presence of expletive there in the position in a sentence usually reserved for the
person who takes responsibility for the truth of the state of affairs referred to by the rest
of the sentence prevents any kind of responsibility or intention from being attributed to
anyone (known as illocutionary force in some circles, abstracting away from culturally
contingent notions such as intentionality, see Searle [1969] for the emic view and
Rosaldo [1982] for the anthropological critique, cf. Duranti [1997, 231]). In precisely the
opposite way, the first person pronoun in (8) results in a situation in which the speaker’s
intention is presupposed and the speaker is held responsible for the promise in question
(see Austin 1975 [1962]; Silverstein 1993b, 46).
There are, furthermore, similarities between existential sentences, perception reports
and (although not dealt with in this paper) reported speech in that they correspond to a
segment of the implicational hierarchy for systems of evidentiality.
200