Re: Existential clauses

On Sun, 11 Jul 2004 07:16:44 -0700, Philippe Caquant <herodote92@...>
wrote:

>> Maybe this is where I'd use "to be"? Nevertheless,
>> as David said, here
>> what follows "to be" is also an adverbial.
>
>Huh ? I find it hard to understand that word
>'adverbial' here. It's a 'sort-of' relation, a kind of
>a definition, or an element of a class, or whatever
>you might call it (1). 'Adverbial' normally refers to
>a verbal concept, like in 'Colorless green ideas sleep
>furiously' : 'furiously' is adverbial, it (strangely)
>completes the verb "to sleep".
I used this word here in an unfortunate context as it seems. In school we
learnt that when you analyze a sentence for subject, predicate and object
that what remains (e.g. location, time etc.) are "adverbials of ...".
Otherwise, I would have said "adverb".

The "Essential clauses" message's header is a typo. It also should have
been in this thread. I just wanted to ask what I could enter in Google to
find more information about my problem. Entering '"to be" semantics' yields
a too wide range, since Google also does not accept quotation marks that
are meant to be quotation marks as it seems (I typed in double quotation
marks, the result was as if I would not have used any quotation marks at
all.). And "be" appears quite often in normal English texts.

-- Carsten