John,
    My own perspective on your second example would be that "there" is not the subject of the sentence, but is a place holder for the extraposed subject, which shows up on the right (other) side of the verb. You could unravel it to "A life was here then.:
    It's hard to explain your first example outside of context. Example (I'm guessing). "Was there ever a good reason to marry her?" "There never was." In this instance "A good reason to marry her" would be the understood subject.
   For some reason, we don't like to say things like "raining is," so we say "It is raining." I think "there" (in these instances) is functioning in the same way. A sentence can be called existential when you are asserting the existence of something. Your second sentence does a little more than that with "here" and "then" as modifiers.
    I look forward to other views.

Craig

On 10/27/2010 8:36 PM, John Chorazy wrote:
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Hello to all...

Please share some wisdom on the use of "there" as an expletive expression taking the dummy role/position as subject (not an adverb) in the following models taken from Sam Shepard's True West. My understanding is that the expletive "there" must be the subject of a verb of existence, which happens here in the past tense, to be the subject of a sentence... it's not in the locative, if I'm correct. Thank you!

 

"There never was."

"There was a life here then."

 

 

John



John Chorazy
English III Academy, Honors, and Academic
Pequannock Township High School

Nulla dies sine linea.

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