0

Consider this sentence:

There could be a chance.

What part of speech is the word there in this sentence?

tchrist
  • 134,759
Andy
  • 1
  • 2
    The question pointed to as the "answer" contains no correct answer and does not point in any useful directions. Bad choice. This is what's wrong with closing duplicates -- no quality control on answers. – John Lawler Aug 06 '14 at 14:00
  • @JohnLawler Yeah, that kinda bugged me, too: those aren’t good answers there — at all. In a perfect world, a new and better answer would be added to the original question whose answers were poor and which this one is now linked to. We don’t really have much choice about wrong answers being selected as “Accepted”, but perhaps if you could be so kind as to provide a good one, the original asker will notice. In any event, the rest of us surely will, and eventually the correct answer will be upvoted above the selected but wrong one. – tchrist Aug 06 '14 at 15:16
  • Votes are irrelevant. And so are parts of speech. It's pretending that there are answers to silly questions like this that's the problem. If you want to close this question, point it at something on There-Insertion, of which there is a plenitude already. – John Lawler Aug 06 '14 at 15:24
  • 1
    @JohnLawler Yeah, tell me about the part-of-speech is irrelevant thing. Gosh. I had a much too long argument yesterday about that with a guy who would not accept anything regarding that notion. It was like an article of faith to him that a word could have only one possible part of speech, that by assigning it such it gained meaning and you gained understanding, and that there was some “authoritative” list of such things somewhere that everyone recognized and used — and used in the same way no less. I finally gave up; you just can’t use reason on religious zealotry. – tchrist Aug 06 '14 at 16:08
  • @tchrist Hit him with 'galore'. – Edwin Ashworth Aug 06 '14 at 19:00
  • For what it's worth, the Internet Grammar of English labels existential there as constituting a minor word class. Sussex University Linguistics staff also claim it is a syncategorematic item ('In some cases, we find that a single word exhibits unique behaviour, behaviour shared by no other word in the language....the negative not ... Other such unique words are the polite please (as in Please pass the salt), the infinitival to (as in I want to go home), the existential there (There’s a wasp on your back), delexical it ...') – Edwin Ashworth Aug 06 '14 at 22:29

0 Answers0