A Word, Please: There exists more than one form of there

“A man is walking down the street.” “There is a man walking down the street.”

What’s the difference between these two sentences? And, if it’s negligible, why do we have two ways to say the same thing?

These sentences are identical in meaning. Some walking is going on. A man is doing it. Period. But look at the grammar and there’s a very important difference.

In the first, the grammatical subject of the sentence, the man, happens to be the doer of the action, the walking. In the second, we have the same person doing the same thing. Yet he’s no longer the subject of the sentence. Grammatically, the subject is “there.” What’s up with that?

Meet “existential there” — an oddity of language that people use every day without thinking about it. To understand existential there, we need a big-picture understanding of the word “there.”

Most often, “there” is used to refer to location: Ray parks his car there. Don’t go there. Did you try the pizza there?

In this job, “there” is an adverb. Remember that adverbs aren’t only those “ly” words that modify verbs and adjectives. Adverbs are a much broader class of words that answer the questions where? when? and in what manner? So because “there” deals with location in a sentence like “He parked his car there” and “Don’t go there,” it’s an adverb.

But “there” has a different job in “There is a man walking down the street.” It’s not about location. It deals instead with the fact that the man exists: “There is a man.” This “there” is functioning as a pronoun to become what’s known as “existential there.” Existential there lets you rearrange information to emphasize that something exists. That is, if the man’s existence is notable enough to point out, you can use the pronoun “there” to make that the central point of your sentence.

Grammatically, however, existential there creates a puzzle of sorts. In a sentence like “There is a man walking, “there” isn’t performing the action. So grammarians have a way of explaining it. The pronoun “there” is the grammatical subject. The noun doing the action, in this case the man, is called the “notional subject.”

It means that, for all practical purposes, he’s the intended subject of the sentence. We’ve simply rearranged things so that the pronoun “there” is standing in for “man” in the grammatical role of subject.

Can all this hair-splitting help your writing? Yes. While it’s true that both of these forms are grammatically correct, one of them — with surprising frequency — turns out to be a poor choice, frequently plaguing amateur writing while often eschewed by pros.

If you think that “A man is walking down the street” sounds more like something you’d see in professionally edited writing than “There is a man,” that’s because it is.

Quality writing puts as much emphasis as possible on tangible subjects and action-oriented verbs. “There” is not a tangible subject. “Is” is not an action-oriented verb. So “There is a man walking” takes all the action out of the main clause and makes it a mere modifying phrase “walking down the street.” The result is less vivid writing.

Also, existential there flogs the obvious. If there’s a man walking down the street, then of course the man exists. Why waste ink saying so?

Besides, existential there creates longer sentences. In professional writing, efficiency is highly prized, meaning that if you can say the same thing with fewer words, you probably should.

Obviously, there is a time and a place for existential there. It’s just not as useful as some writers seem to think.

JUNE CASAGRANDE is the author of “The Best Punctuation Book, Period.” She can be reached at [email protected].