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Beyond New Information: There existential constructions in Black Beauty and their pedagogical suggestions

  • The Sociolinguistic Journal of Korea
  • Abbr : 사회언어학
  • 2026, 34(3), pp.233~255
  • Publisher : The Sociolinguistic Society Of Korea
  • Research Area : Humanities > Linguistics
  • Received : June 23, 2026
  • Accepted : September 7, 2026
  • Published : September 30, 2026

Shin Sona 1

1해군사관학교

Accredited

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.

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