It is the claim of this article that Existential Sentences integrate a larger class of constructions of Brazilian Portuguese. Contrary to what has been proposed in the literature, Brazilian Portuguese Existential Sentences are not a subclass of sentences built with ergative verbs and a postposed subject. Based on the properties observed in the analysis of a corpus of spoken Brazilian Portuguese, we contend that Existential Sentences fall into a class of constructions that we call impersonal constructions.
Existential Sentence
