Expletive vs. Locative There in Korean EFL Grammar: A Diagnostic Approach to Syntactic Subjecthood

This study investigates how Korean EFL learners comprehend the English existential there-construction, focusing on the distinction between expletive and locative uses of there. Due to surface similarity and the absence of expletive subjects in Korean, learners often misinterpret there as a locative adverb. To examine this, 59 Korean learners and 18 native English speakers completed a grammaticality judgment task involving tag questions, inversion, and co-occurrence of there and here. Findings reveal that while learners showed some awareness of existential constructions, many failed to recognize ungrammatical uses where here replaced expletive there. Learners also struggled with constructions involving both expletive and locative elements, often perceiving them as redundant or incorrect. These results highlight persistent confusion between syntactic and spatial functions of there. The study underscores the need for explicit instruction on the grammatical role of expletive there and contributes to our understanding of second language syntactic development.