There was plenty of food. There were a hundred people at the party.

[5jj]

Interrogative: Is there a jumper?

OK, but not Is there my jumper?

 

[jutfrank]

OK, but not Is there my jumper?

Right. It doesn't usually make sense to question the existence of a definite noun phrase such as this. If it's 'my' jumper, it's real, and therefore its existence is unquestionable. Is what you mean?

 

[5jj]

It is.

 

[emsr2d2]

One more thing has occurred to me. If a sentence starts "There's/There are + definite article/personal pronoun", the "there + be" part is almost always locational.

There's the cat!
There are the missing books.
There's my jumper.
There are my headphones.

There are exceptions to this. For example, if I asked "What are the biggest problems facing the government?", the answer could be "Well, there's the economy, the health service and climate change. They're the most pressing". In that case, "there's" is followed by the definite article but it's existential.

 

[Tarheel]

Now that you have repeated that I understand the meaning of those lines.

 

[Bambook]

If you're talking pure syntactics only, then yes, that's the transformation. My point, however, was that it's not possible to make such a transformation in real language since there's no actual propositional content. The utterance in real language is a way to show that you've just identified the location of your lost jumper. You can't really make a question out of that as it doesn't make sense. The closest you can get is something like:

Let me ask again. I still think that a sentence like "Is my jumper there?" can exist and can be meaningful. Imagine that you are guessing that your jumper is in a washing machine but you want to make sure and so you are asking someone "Is my jumper there?".

 

[emsr2d2]

No one said that "Is my jumper there?" was impossible. Of course it's possible and meaningful. There are loads of situations in which it could be used and it refers to location.

The point was that "Is there my jumper?", an attempt at an existential interrogative based on the same words, is not possible.

 

[Bambook]

No one said that "Is my jumper there?" was impossible.

I got the point now. Thank you.

 

[jutfrank]

Let me ask again. I still think that a sentence like "Is my jumper there?" can exist and can be meaningful. Imagine that you are guessing that your jumper is in a washing machine but you want to make sure and so you are asking someone "Is my jumper there?".

Yes, of course it's perfectly meaningful in such a context. My point was to with the pragmatics, and that if There's my jumper is an utterance with the pragmatic force of expressing discovery of your jumper—to point it out after having searched for it, then it's not really possible to ask a related question. It's just something you say to indicate that the search is now finally over, and you're happy about it.

If you say Is my jumper there? you're doing something different—you're simply questioning whether your jumper is in a particular place.