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ISSN : 1226-4822(Print)
The Sociolinguistic Journal of Korea Vol.34 No.3 pp.233-255
DOI : http://dx.doi.org/10.14353/sjk.2026.34.3.08
DOI : http://dx.doi.org/10.14353/sjk.2026.34.3.08
Beyond New Information: There existential constructions in Black Beauty and their pedagogical suggestions
Abstract
This paper examines how existential There constructions (ETCs) are distributed across Anna Sewell's Black Beauty, and whether their role extends beyond simple new-information introduction. All 212 ETCs that occurred across the novel's four parts were manually extracted and sorted into four functional categories: Negation/Absence, Quantification/Qualification, New Information, and Others. New Information remains the single largest category (36.8%), but Negation/Absence and Quantification/Qualification combined make up 51.9% of the corpus, indicating that non-prototypical uses are collectively at least as prominent as canonical presentational ones. The four parts show a descriptive functional tendency, though cross-part differences did not reach statistical significance: prototypical presentational uses dominate the novel's opening (Part 1), absence-marking intensifies in Part 2, quantificational uses rise alongside the novel's socioeconomic critique in Part 3, and Part 4 blends quantification with evaluative and retrospective functions. These results position existential There as a flexible discourse resource rather than a fixed syntactic placeholder, and the paper closes with pedagogical suggestions for introducing ETCs to Korean EFL learners through literary texts.
초록
Vol. 40 No. 4 (2022.12)
Frequency Published four times annually in March, June, September, and December
Doi Prefix 10.14353/sjk.
Year of Launching 1993
Publisher The Sociolinguistic Society of Korea
Online Submission
socioling.jams.or.kr
The Sociolinguistic
Society of Korea
socioling.com
Editorial Office Contact Information
- Tel: +81-10-3894-3164
- E-mail: schang@hoseo.edu
