Linguistic Study of Existential and Locative" There" with Reference to Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter

Abstract

Abstract
English language has two main kinds of "there": Existential "there" and locative "there". The two uses of "there" are polysemic variations of the same word. In fact, "there" can be understood in different situations with different interpretations either to be existential "there" or locative "there". As existential, "there" is a formal device refers to the existence or the presence of someone or something. It also points to a specific syntactic structure: It functions as a grammatical subject. In addition, "there" as a locative expresses various abstractions of space. It functions as an adverbial rather than as a grammatical subject. This paper investigates the various syntactic, semantic, phonological, and discoursal properties of existential and locative "there". Additionally, this paper formulates an analysis of existential and locative "there" at its syntactic and discoursal levels in English. For this reason, literary work has been chosen. The data of this paper consists of ten texts from Hawthorn's Scarlet Letter.