What is the part of speech for there in There a lake town?

In the sentence "There is a lake town", the word "there" functions as an expletive.

Here's why:

* Expletives are words that fill a grammatical slot but don't contribute to the meaning of the sentence. They are used to create a specific sentence structure.

* In this case, "there" is used to introduce the subject "a lake town."

* The actual subject of the sentence is "a lake town," but "there" takes the subject position for grammatical reasons.

While "there" might appear to be an adverb, it's not modifying any other word in the sentence. It's purely a placeholder for grammatical structure.