Grammar Points :There is-there are
“There” is a kind of pronoun used to show something you know exists.
Compare these two sentences:
- “A fly is in my soup.”
- “There is a fly in my soup!”
The first sentence is factual and impersonal. The fly is the subject, and the soup is the object. In the second sentence the object is “a fly in my soup”, so the subject is “There”. “There” functions as a kind of dummy subject that represents a more personal perspective, rather than a factual statement.
Especially in spoken English we usually use the contraction “there’s”, rather than “there is”.
There is usually subject-verb agreement when using there is/there are. For example:
- There are ten students in my class.
- There is ten students in my class.
