The present study of contemporary English existential there-constructions (TCs) offers a general view of the state-of-art in current investigation about these constructions, and a corpus-driven analysis of their use in present day British speech and writing. From a functional perspective, this work gathers data from a sub-corpus of the British National Corpus and pays special attention to the influence that the medium of expression might have on the frequency, distribution, form and function of TCs. It addresses the need for a joint approach to TCs that focuses not only on their syntactic and semantic aspects, but also on their pragmatics. From the initial assumption of the signal function of there and TCs, the study proposes a pragmatic categorization of TCs in context, and presents it as the basis for an effective methodology that might lead to a better understanding of TCs and their use in contemporary English.