Re: "There can be"

 >  Also, if you like your conlang to have same natural language
>  influences,
Whoops, I guess that was exactly what you were looking for. So to
summarize (hopefully I'm getting this correct -- it's been a while
since I looked at the paper), lots of natural languages use one of two
kinds of constructions for "there is/are":

1. Some sort of 'have' predication. For example:
French: il y + avoir (it there + to have)
Spanish: haber (which is used as auxiliary 'have', and older Spanish
also used to use it as possessive 'have', as in 'he dos libros')
Swahili: kuwa na ('to be with' or 'to have')

2. Some sort of "locative inversion".
English: (there) is a mouse on the piece of cheese
Russian: na stole byla kniga ('on table was book' = 'there was a book
on the table')
Hindi: kamre mein AdmI hai ('room in man is' = 'there is a man in the room')

Lots more examples in the paper =).

> Ray Freeze has a great paper ("Existentials and other
>  locatives") on the 'there is' construction: