Three new chapters expand the coverage of English grammar: Tense-Aspect-Modality in Discourse, Reference and Possession, and Adverbials. Completely updated and rewritten chapters include newly synthesized linguistic and applied linguistic research, new exercises, and new references | Chapter 23 Nonreferential It and There as Subjects 455 trade has been so heavily involved with England that there Is even an English club founded in 1785 . The final study of written discourse that we shall summarize here is one of research reports published in journal articles Thomas and Hawes 1994 . The authors of this study did not focus exclusively on nonreferential subjects being more generally interested in the syntactic choices available to writers for making reporting statements. Of the 129 reports they analyzed approximately 10 percent had nonreferential it or there as subjects followed by the be verb. A reporting statement with there in particular was used to assert the existence of evidence. It seemed to be used when the writer was submitting evidence of a certain kind in connection with a point he or she was making. These themes cooccurred with nouns like evidence and support such as There is increasing support for the hypothesis. Here is an example from their data. Chronic bronchitic patients do seem to suffer from high levels of psychiatric disorder and a close liaison between chest physicians and psychiatrists or clinical psychologists may contribute to the effectiveness of patient management There is some evidence that alleviation of psychiatric symptoms is associated with a reduction of breathlessness. The first sentence is making a tentative claim by the writer. The writer then brings in evidence in the form of a report as the basis for making the claim. The structure allows the foregrounding of the word evidence and the clause qualifying it so that the relationship between the two sentences the claim and the supporting evidence is highlighted. All of the examples of it used in reports are anticipatory it a structure with which we deal in Chapter 31. Conclusion We have seen that the scope and complexity of sentences with nonreferential subjects is far greater than what most reference grammars would lead us to believe. It has been claimed in some .
