Functioning of Existential Clauses Across the Stages of Narrative in ‘A house of pomegranates’, by Oscar Wilde

Abstract

This paper aims to identify the functions prototypical existential clauses (there-be construction) may perform across the stages of narratives in a small corpus comprising A house of pomegranates, a collection of short stories by Oscar Wilde. The analysis draws upon Systemic-Functional Linguistics as theoretical framework for the concepts of existential clause and stages of narrative and builds upon Corpus Linguistics as a method of collecting and preparing data. After finding the instances of prototypical existential clauses and tagging the corresponding stages, the functions of the existential clauses in the narratives were identified. Findings show that existential clauses may occur in any stage of a narrative and perform five functions, namely, describing, introducing, listing, pointing, and pondering. Describing and pondering are the most frequent functions in the corpus. The describing function is mainly related to the Orientation and Resolution stages, while the pondering function mostly relates to the Complication and Evaluation stages.