A Review Study of Information-Structural Perspectives on THERE Existential Sentences

Abstract

Purpose: This paper is to review some recent studies on There existential sentences under the notion of Infor-mation Structure, showing that the main purpose of using There sentence is to stress negative or quantifier words within the sentence. It begins with some research data on the patterns of There existential sentences in two Eng-lish novels, one Korean-English translation and three versions of English-Korean translation: ‘Sense and Sensibil-ity’, ‘Pride and Prejudice’ by Jane Austen; and three English-Korean translations of ‘Pride and Prejudice’ . Then, it follows two empirical studies on the acquisition level of There sentences. Method: There are two studies on research data analysis and two empirical studies. The first research data of two novels is from Literature Online Collection(Lion) and uses AntConc corpus analysis toolkit(3.5.8.0). In the sec-ond study, ‘The Vegetarian’ is chosen as a representative of Korean-English novel because it won The Man Booker International Prize. However, the three English-Korean translated versions of ‘Pride and Prejudice’ are randomly chosen. Then, the first acquisition level study has 17 university students answer 9 questions on information struc-ture sentences; There expletive, passive and inversion sentences, and the second study has 75 students answer 12 questions on There sentences only. Both studies use SPSS 20.0 for the data analysis. Results: According to the text analysis, more than 50% of There sentences have negative words or quantifiers with nouns as a way of end-focus realization. In other words, one of the main reasons to use the There construc-tion is to stress the non-existence of a certain noun or the quantity of a noun using There expletive. Thus, the data from translations says There sentences with quantifiers are more realized than those with negatives, and this also applies to the level of acquisition. The survey participants of the empirical studies are shown more aware of the sentences with quantifiers than negative words. Conclusion: English writers or speakers use There expletive sentences for specific reasons and one of them is to make readers or hearers to focus on some negatives or quantifiers with the nouns within the sentence. However, it seems that this reason has not been considered in both English education and English-Korean translation. Even though the studies mentioned in this paper need more back up data in both research and empirical area, this summary of previous studies will be a starting point to lead to further studies in this field.