was a God", "There is not a God" ("There is no God"), "Is there a God?", "There might be a God", "He was anxious for there to be a God" etc. Pingelapese An existential sentence is one of four structures associated within the Pingelapese language of Micronesia. The form heavily uses a post-verbal subject order and explains what exists or does not exist. Only a few Pingelapese verbs are used existential sentence structure: minae- "to exist", soh- "not to exist", dir- "to exist in large numbers", and daeri- "to be finished". All four verbs have a post-verbal subject in common and usually introduce new characters to a story. If a character is already known, the verb would be used in the preverbal position. Indication of possession In some languages, linguistic possession (in a broad sense) is indicated by existential clauses, rather than by a verb like have. For example, in Russian, "I have a friend" can be expressed by the sentence у меня есть друг u menya yest' drug, literally "at me there is a friend". Russian has a verb иметь imet''' meaning "have", but it is less commonly used than the former method. Other examples include Irish "(There) is (a) pen at me" (for "I have a pen”). Hungarian "(There) is a fish-my" (for "I have a fish") and Turkish "two notebook-my (there) is" (for "I have two notebooks"). In Maltese, a change over time has been noted: "in the possessive construction, subject properties have been transferred diachronically from the possessed noun phrase to the possessor, while the possessor has all the subject properties except the form of the verb agreement that it triggers." References Sources Everaert, M., H. van Riemsdijk and R. Goedemans (eds.) 2006. The Blackwell Companion to Syntax. London: Blackwell, London. [See "Existential sentences and expletive there" in Volume II.] Graffi, G. 2001. 200 Years of Syntax: A critical survey. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Milsark, G. L. 1979. Existential Sentences in English. New York & London: Garland. [Published version of 1974 MIT Ph. D. dissertation] Moro, A. 1997. The Raising of Predicates: Predicative noun phrases and the theory of clause structure''. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Clauses Grammatical construction types