(61) a. The dog is in the garden b. There is a dog in the garden […] (i) the difference between (61a) and (61b) is located in a difference in pragmatic function relevant to the argument term “the dog”; (ii) the argument term in the “there”-construction is said to have the pragmatic function “Presentative”, which is defined as follows (“ibid.” 171 [Hannay, 1985, English existentials in Functional Grammar, Dordrecht, Foris]): “A term with presentative function refers to an entity which the speaker by means of the associated predication wishes to explicitly introduce into the world of discourse”; (iii) this pragmatic function is then used to trigger those rules which carry the argument term to its non-initial position, and introduce the dummy element “there”. […] I shall use the term New Topic for this “presentative function”, in order to stress its position in the strategies for introducing, maintaining, and renewing “discourse topics”.
- Dik (1989), Pag. 179