Negative existentials (e.g. Unicorns do not exist), which paradoxically deny the existence of what they presuppose to exist, have long puzzled philosophers, culminating in the early-twentieth-century debate between Russell and Meinong (Cartwright 1960, Clapp 2009, Reicher 2015, Smith 1985). Linguists, however, have only recently turned their attention to negative existentials, especially from a typological point of view (Croft 1991, Kahrel and Van den Berg 1994, Veselinova 2013, 2014). We here investigate the claim that in most languages of Western Europe, there are no ‘special’ negative existentials as these make use of standard negation applied to positive existentials (Veselinova 2013). Our overall assumption is that, though negative existentials do display standard negation, they have distinct syntactic, semantic and pragmatic properties. First, we hypothesize that if something doesn’t exist at all, it is hardly relevant to specify where it doesn’t exist and how it doesn’t manifest itself. In a sample of 300 positive and negative existentials in Dutch, English and French (extracted from the ParaSol corpus), positive existentials indeed appear to contain an explicit Ground (e.g. There’s a strange cat in the garden) and/or a presentational verb such as appear, erupt, occur etc. significantly more often (p<0.01) than negative existentials, which rely more strongly on grammaticalized structures (e.g. there+be ; il y+avoir in French). Second, we assume that negative (there-)existentials mainly express backgrounded states and therefore rarely make use of an aorist (e.g. the passé simple in French), which is typically used in foregrounded events. This prediction is confirmed by results obtained for a sample of ca. 500 existentials in French, Italian, Rumanian, Portuguese and Spanish (again from the ParaSol corpus, with a 60/40 positive/negative existential ratio) : aorists are found overwhelmingly in positive existentials (52 positive vs. 7 negative instances). Moreover, we hypothesize that the lexical verb exist or its equivalent in other languages is used for ‘categorical’, predicative judgements about entities whose ontological status can be debated and therefore mainly occurs in negative existentials (e.g. Black holes don’t exist), in contrast to grammaticalized structures with there or equivalent, which are more typically used to introduce a new entity and are therefore relatively more common in positive environments. This meaning-based asymmetry prediction is borne out for English and confirmed in a set of 442 existentials of either type (‘exist’ vs. grammaticalized structure) in Dutch, French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish (p<0.001). Third, we observe that some negative existential idioms with there (or equivalent in other Western languages) have no positive counterpart. Many of these have a modal meaning and special illocutionary force (e.g. There’s no (use) stopping them ‘one can’t stop them’ ⇒« ‘let’s not (try to) stop them’) or involve scalar reasoning : negative polarity items and comparatives trigger a reinforced reading (e.g. There isn’t a shadow of a doubt ⇒ »‘There isn’t any doubt whatsoever’ ; There’s no better X than Y ⇒ ‘Y is the best X’). We conclude that negative existentials, even in Western languages, are syntactically different from positive existentials and that these differences reflect their distinct semantico-pragmatic properties. References Cartwright, Richard L. 1960. Negative existentials. Journal of Philosophy 57, 629–639.
 Clapp, Lenny. 2009. The problem of negative existentials does not exist : A case for dynamic semantics. Journal of Pragmatics 41(7), 1422–1434 Croft, William. 1991. The Evolution of Negation. Journal of Linguistics 27, 1–39.
Kahrel, Peter and René van den Berg (eds.). 1994. Typological studies in negation. Amsterdam : John Benjamins. Reicher, Maria. 2015. ‘Nonexistent objects’. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/n..., accessed 12 January 2016. Smith, Janet Farrell. 1985. The Russell-Meinong Debate. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 45, 305–350. Veselinova, Ljuba. 2013. Negative existentials : A cross-linguistic study. Rivista di Linguistica 25(1), 107– 146. Veselinova, Ljuba. 2014. The negative existential cycle revisited. Linguistics 52, 1327–1369.