Well, there's the list reading

The aim of this paper is to show that if we treat the English there-construction as a type of copula construction, we can provide a unified analysis of the existential and the list reading. Research on copula structures has distinguished at least three types: predicational, specificational and identificational (or equative). Putting aside the identificational construction, in which two referential DPs are equated, I argue that the cut between the predicational and specificational structures can be found with the there-construction as well. As has been shown previously, there are several arguments to take the existential construction as an instance of a predicational copula construction, which I will present. Following a suggestion by Safir (1985), I will show that it makes sense to treat the list reading that occurs with there as a specificational variant of the there-construction. This move rounds up the picture of looking at there-constructions as a copula structure.