What else is there to say about existential there?

What is it about?

This work examines the occurrence of existential there-clauses (ETCs) in written Nigerian English, focusing on distribution and frequency, predicators, complements and adjuncts, and syntactic functions as sentence, clause, and group structure elements. The data comprises 661 ETCs sourced from the 400,796-word written component of the International Corpus of English Nigeria (ICE-Nigeria). The scale-and-category version of the systemic grammatical model is the analytical framework utilized. The analysis reveals an ETC-occurrence rate in 1000 words of 1.65 and a dominance of independent clauses as syntactic function. Whereas BE accounts for 98 percent of predicators and a (n) and no are the highest occurring modifiers, indefinite pronouns constitute only 6.3 percent of complements. The study notes that while genre and subject matter determine the frequency of existential there, its occurrence as complement of the let-type imperative clause questions existing theory and description.

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Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

Why is it important?

This study of existential there, regarded as the most natural way of stating that something or somebody exists, is important because known studies have excluded the new Englishes and neglected the syntactic behavior of there-clauses in texts. The authors provide a thorough and systematic descriptive study of ETCs in the written component of ICE-Nigeria, and offer a comprehensive analysis of ETCs at all syntactic levels possible and in all the seventeen genres therein. This will contribute to the characterization of ETCs in the grammar of English.

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