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This paper claims that the appropriate associate for ‘there’ is the small clause complement to the copula. It is argued that ‘there’ acts as a topic quantifier and that the small clause acts to provide a restriction for this topic quantifier. Furthermore, the SC in a ‘there’ existential sentence is licensed not by the T0 head of Tense but by the D0 of the expletive ‘there’. This approach is able to explain several puzzles associated with ‘there’ existential sentences, including the predicate restriction, the definiteness effect, and the contradictory subject (agreement) and object (extraction, scope) properties of the postcopular NP.
