In general, the upper echelons of corpus word frequency lists are populated by grammatical items such as pronouns, prepositions or conjunctions; however, these lists are often also characterised by items of a more polysemous nature. For example, the top 20 most frequent words in the Limerick Corpus of Irish English (LCIE) contain the items that, like, know and there. Both like and know, have already been extensively researched across multiple varieties of English and their frequency levels have been shown to be due to interpersonal, rather than lexical, concerns. Therefore, attention to such high frequency items has already resulted in rich and rewarding insights from comparative corpus pragmatic analysis. Less attention has been devoted to items such as there (or indeed, that). This paper focuses on two corpora of Irish English that are dominated by the language used between family and friends – LCIE and the Corpus of Irish English Correspondence (CORIECOR) – to investigate the varietal nuances of there. While our analysis shows the expected existential and spatial functions, it also suggests that there has other properties. We argue that there, through a process of functional leakage (Agha 1996: 660), has acquired both a temporal use, evidenced through its patterning with specific time references, and an involvement marker use, evidenced by its higher frequency of occurrence in the language of family and friends and its use with specific verbs in these contexts. In this sense, a corpus pragmatic approach to the study of items that have traditionally been treated from sentence-level, language-as-system perspectives is key in order to reveal patterns in real-world contexts that characterise the interpersonal in language-as-discourse.