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Why is this article in category:Personal pronouns? When entering "Impersonal pronoun" into the search box, I am redirected here. Perhaps the category should be changed to just "Pronouns" Passengers ( talk) 20:56, 25 October 2009 (UTC)
Do we need both Dummy pronoun and Expletive?
It could be said that what's at Expletive about pronouns might better be here at Dummy pronoun, because, well, y'know, expletive is a fucking silly word for a dummy pronoun, more formally called a pleonastic pronoun. To which I'd counter that while I'm willing to accept that some people more formally call it a pleonastic pronoun, the term most commonly used in current linguistics (e.g. Radford, Minimalist Syntax) is not pleonastic pronoun but expletive pronoun. So I'd be inclined instead to merge what's here with what's at Expletive and redirect from here to there.
While I'm perfectly happy to "be bold", I don't relish revert wars; they're tiresome. So I thought I'd bring up the idea here first. What say? -- Hoary 03:48, 2005 Apr 29 (UTC)
First, yes, I agree that "expletive" and "pleonastic" essentially/originally have the same meaning. A simple question, though: which is (are) the standard term(s) for the "It" of "It's a mystery why this happened", etc.? The library's closed, so for books I'll have to depend on what happen to be on my shelves; conveniently, two reference works, two theoretical syntax works, and one descriptive work.
this is all complete bullshyt(no mention of pleonastic)
This suggests to me that either dummy or expletive would be OK, but gives me no reason to think that pleonastic is a standard term.
So how about pleonastic? I tried googling for pleonastic pronoun and found for example www.eng.helsinki.fi/hes/Corpora/helsinki_dialect_corpus2.htm which uses the term in a different way; to simplify the writers' (English) example, the us within us boys. (This surprises me, as us neither seems pleonastic in the normal sense of the word nor is meaningless.) In this page about Friulian, it's used as Trask uses it: for a morpheme marked for number and person that duplicates the subject.
I don't deny that pleonastic pronoun is used for the it of It's unclear what he meant, but if so it does seem to be a third choice behind dummy and expletive. I therefore suggest changing pleonastic to expletive where the latter is appropriate. -- Hoary 08:10, 2005 Apr 30 (UTC)
"It's raining" does not contain any dummy. "It" is the sky. Lucidish 04:02, 15 August 2005 (UTC)
Right then, I've made some changes.
Let us see:
With the definition given above, saying that it in It is raining is a dummy pronoun is strictly correct, since either:
The contention comes next, when an example is given, and then the text says:
Note that the last part corresponds to English, and is not part of the definition, but an explanation/justification of why this it is a dummy pronoun. It's not a necessary condition, but it definitely is, IMHO, a sufficient condition: if you can't replace it by any noun phrase, then it's a dummy pronoun.
I'd like to add some reflections touching this tangentially. In Spanish, which does not use this kind of dummy-or-whatever construction, the weather verbs are commonly impersonal. It would be extremely weird, quite possibly ungrammatical I'd say, to utter the equivalent of English The sky is raining. At most the "subject" appears as a complement: Del cielo llueve ("From the sky it rains"). However, some of these verbs can take something that looks syntactically like a direct object, and yet behaves morphologically as a subject:
English does have raining cats and dogs, but in Spanish the verb agrees with the (apparent) object! (están is plural, agreeing with ranas, and está is singular, agreeing with helado). Yet you don't hear anyone inverting the sentence into its "proper" SV arrangement (*Ranas están lloviendo.).
The Spanish pattern is much alike other non-weather intransitive verbs where the subject is a patient, as often seen with caer "to fall" and morir "to die", though for some reason it's much more common when the subject is indefinite.
There is one case that I can think of when a "weather" verb in Spanish takes a non-weird subject in the manner of English: aclarar ("to clear", "to brighten") with cielo "sky".
Many people prefer a pseudo-reflexive with se: Se está aclarando el cielo ("the sky is clearing [itself]"). This reinforces my idea: the sky is not an agent, it cannot be an agent, and therefore it's left in object position after the verb, but a dummy se (!) is required before.
This is not intended to change anyone's opinion about English, since it's after all a different language. It only means to show that in a pro-drop-language, the place before an impersonal verb may never be seen as an "empty" subject slot — there's simply nothing there, and a subject has no meaning; or else the subject and the object are perceived as the same, and since the actions of the weather are by definition non-agentive, there's a tendency to treat the weird argument as an object, at least syntactically, or as a medio-passive/pseudo-reflexive subject.
Some more comments as food for thought: in English the same pattern is used for weather, temperature of an object, and perception of temperature by a person: to be + adjective (it's hot, it's hot, I'm hot). In Spanish the three are completely different, and there may be an alternative for the weather:
Maybe the difference has to do with the impersonal nature of weather. Está caluroso has an understood subject, but Hace calor does not (*El clima hace calor is ridiculous).
OK, shutting up now... -- Pablo D. Flores ( Talk) 19:21, 1 September 2005 (UTC)
Well, either I'm inspired or delirious, but bear with me a bit more. It is obvious that the violence will continue is a fairly common sentence where the subject (that the violence will continue) has been dislocated (← That this violence will continue is obvious). Is this not also the case with It is raining?
Again, not trying to fit English into Spanish, but in Spanish the answers would be lluvia "rain" and perros y gatos "cats and dogs", respectively, and probably without the slightest hesitation. In English, of course, it is not only perfectly grammatical but also non-weird to say Cats and dogs are raining from the sky, and I believe it'd be rather weird and maybe ungrammatical to say Cats and dogs are being rained by the sky (that is, it'd be weird to treat "cats and dogs" as the direct object and "the sky" as the subject).
Better yet, isn't it grammatical to say A drizzle is raining, even though idiomatically you must prefer A drizzle is falling?
I think the English weather it fills a slot left by a dislocation of a subject that is then deleted, and that this subject is not a source like "the sky" or "the clouds", but a patient (passive entity) like "rain" or "snow" or "drops" or whatever, just as it happens in Spanish, and analog to the Spanish treatment of patientive-subject intransitives like caer "to fall".
This is all and very explicitly original research and I can barely get my head around it myself, so I'm not going to inject this into the article, but I'd like to know whether this makes sense or not.
-- Pablo D. Flores ( Talk) 20:05, 1 September 2005 (UTC)
on dummies:
The definition of "dummy word" given above appears to be at odds with this source.
http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsADummyWord.htm
Can you provide a source for the given definition? Lucidish 00:53, 2 September 2005 (UTC)
on the rest:
I find myself lacking in the proper training to be able to answer much of what's been written here, but there are at least a few things I can reply to.
This may provide some backup to my position: http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=185169 It seems to suggest claims that are very similar to mine with respect to what they call an "anticipatory it". Sadly, I can't tell whether or not the "weather it" is a subclass of the anticipatory it, or get much more than the abstract, since this is a pay service. Lucidish
(Update) I was able to scrounge up a copy of the article. It does indeed provide backup to my claim, though their argument is not nearly as strong as I would like for it to be. Anyway. Here's the relevant section of text:
"..Compare, for instance, the following uses of prop it:
The generally held view that prop it is a more or less meaningless ‘dummy’ is, however, challenged by Bolinger (1977: 77–87), who maintains that it ‘retains at least some value beyond that of plugging a grammatical hole’ (Bolinger, 1977: 67). Bolinger’s discussion builds on the notion of ‘all-encompassing states’ used by Chafe (1970) to describe sentences such as It’s late, It’s Tuesday. According to Chafe (1970: 101) ‘they [all-encompassing states] cover the total environment, not just some object within it’. For Bolinger this is an indication that prop it (or, in his terms, ambient it) does possess some referential value even if its referent is of a very general nature, in this case the ‘environment’ that is central to the whole area."
So this part of the dispute is also necessary to include, at minimum. Lucidish 22:11, 3 September 2005 (UTC)
Hi, I changed this sentence
"Dummy objects are sometimes used to transform intransitive verbs to transitive light verbs from"
Because all the verbs listed, do, make & get are transitive verbs. ( 89.241.239.33 15:09, 15 September 2007 (UTC))
I am not enough of a linguist to be sure, but it seems to me "there" is a dummy pronoun in sentences like "There is nothing to do". If it's not considered a dummy, what is the presumed referent? Randall Bart Talk 22:00, 27 April 2012 (UTC)
Right now paragraph 3 of the lead says:
This is not right. In this example, "it" can be replaced with the exact noun phrase that it refers to:
This is still an example of a dummy pronoun, specifically an example involving extraposition, and could go in that section of the article. In light of the existence of extraposition-motivated dummy pronouns, the first sentence of paragraph 3 needs to be qualified (and the analysis of this example needs to be corrected, or the example replaced with one that fits the analysis). Loraof ( talk) 17:23, 8 January 2015 (UTC)
I have commented on the page on expletive that I think its definition is weak or faulty. Likewise, I think it is hardly right to call a dummy pronoun pleonastic. It is not redundant or superfluous for a native English speaker. It seems to me that here the words expletive and pleonastic are both exhibitions of editorial erudition rather than reliable-source-based reports of ordinary language usage. I think they should both be removed from their place in the lead of this article. Chjoaygame ( talk) 03:40, 7 January 2016 (UTC)
I was wondering if "it" in "How's it going?" is a dummy pronoun. Anyone here knows? Thanks! -- NKohli (WMF) ( talk) 04:46, 5 April 2017 (UTC)
It seems as though this sentence falls in line with the claim in the article attributed to D. L. Bolinger; That in this case, "it" "simply refers to a general state of affairs in the context of the utterance." 49.98.12.132 ( talk) 05:55, 2 March 2022 (UTC)
Is there a reason not to merge this with Syntactic expletive? Clean Copy talk 11:59, 15 July 2017 (UTC)
Some of the examples here are necessary verb arguments in the respective meaning, others represent a subclause at the end of the sentence. The latter might be seen as meaningless dummy, but the former are not completely meaningless, since they are necessary for their verb and its meaning. A real meaningless dummy is the "es" in these German sentences: "Es wurde geraucht." (Contrast with: "Früher wurde öfter geraucht.") "Es kommt ein Sturm." ("Ein Sturm kommt.") "Es flogen tausende Splitter durch die Luft."
And the "it" in "I bought a Sandwich and ate it" may have a lexical meaning, but it just appears for syntactical reasons. Why is it no dummy? 2A0A:A541:5A30:0:B097:9819:83CC:DC5A ( talk) 18:33, 21 February 2024 (UTC)
This article is rated Start-class on Wikipedia's
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Why is this article in category:Personal pronouns? When entering "Impersonal pronoun" into the search box, I am redirected here. Perhaps the category should be changed to just "Pronouns" Passengers ( talk) 20:56, 25 October 2009 (UTC)
Do we need both Dummy pronoun and Expletive?
It could be said that what's at Expletive about pronouns might better be here at Dummy pronoun, because, well, y'know, expletive is a fucking silly word for a dummy pronoun, more formally called a pleonastic pronoun. To which I'd counter that while I'm willing to accept that some people more formally call it a pleonastic pronoun, the term most commonly used in current linguistics (e.g. Radford, Minimalist Syntax) is not pleonastic pronoun but expletive pronoun. So I'd be inclined instead to merge what's here with what's at Expletive and redirect from here to there.
While I'm perfectly happy to "be bold", I don't relish revert wars; they're tiresome. So I thought I'd bring up the idea here first. What say? -- Hoary 03:48, 2005 Apr 29 (UTC)
First, yes, I agree that "expletive" and "pleonastic" essentially/originally have the same meaning. A simple question, though: which is (are) the standard term(s) for the "It" of "It's a mystery why this happened", etc.? The library's closed, so for books I'll have to depend on what happen to be on my shelves; conveniently, two reference works, two theoretical syntax works, and one descriptive work.
this is all complete bullshyt(no mention of pleonastic)
This suggests to me that either dummy or expletive would be OK, but gives me no reason to think that pleonastic is a standard term.
So how about pleonastic? I tried googling for pleonastic pronoun and found for example www.eng.helsinki.fi/hes/Corpora/helsinki_dialect_corpus2.htm which uses the term in a different way; to simplify the writers' (English) example, the us within us boys. (This surprises me, as us neither seems pleonastic in the normal sense of the word nor is meaningless.) In this page about Friulian, it's used as Trask uses it: for a morpheme marked for number and person that duplicates the subject.
I don't deny that pleonastic pronoun is used for the it of It's unclear what he meant, but if so it does seem to be a third choice behind dummy and expletive. I therefore suggest changing pleonastic to expletive where the latter is appropriate. -- Hoary 08:10, 2005 Apr 30 (UTC)
"It's raining" does not contain any dummy. "It" is the sky. Lucidish 04:02, 15 August 2005 (UTC)
Right then, I've made some changes.
Let us see:
With the definition given above, saying that it in It is raining is a dummy pronoun is strictly correct, since either:
The contention comes next, when an example is given, and then the text says:
Note that the last part corresponds to English, and is not part of the definition, but an explanation/justification of why this it is a dummy pronoun. It's not a necessary condition, but it definitely is, IMHO, a sufficient condition: if you can't replace it by any noun phrase, then it's a dummy pronoun.
I'd like to add some reflections touching this tangentially. In Spanish, which does not use this kind of dummy-or-whatever construction, the weather verbs are commonly impersonal. It would be extremely weird, quite possibly ungrammatical I'd say, to utter the equivalent of English The sky is raining. At most the "subject" appears as a complement: Del cielo llueve ("From the sky it rains"). However, some of these verbs can take something that looks syntactically like a direct object, and yet behaves morphologically as a subject:
English does have raining cats and dogs, but in Spanish the verb agrees with the (apparent) object! (están is plural, agreeing with ranas, and está is singular, agreeing with helado). Yet you don't hear anyone inverting the sentence into its "proper" SV arrangement (*Ranas están lloviendo.).
The Spanish pattern is much alike other non-weather intransitive verbs where the subject is a patient, as often seen with caer "to fall" and morir "to die", though for some reason it's much more common when the subject is indefinite.
There is one case that I can think of when a "weather" verb in Spanish takes a non-weird subject in the manner of English: aclarar ("to clear", "to brighten") with cielo "sky".
Many people prefer a pseudo-reflexive with se: Se está aclarando el cielo ("the sky is clearing [itself]"). This reinforces my idea: the sky is not an agent, it cannot be an agent, and therefore it's left in object position after the verb, but a dummy se (!) is required before.
This is not intended to change anyone's opinion about English, since it's after all a different language. It only means to show that in a pro-drop-language, the place before an impersonal verb may never be seen as an "empty" subject slot — there's simply nothing there, and a subject has no meaning; or else the subject and the object are perceived as the same, and since the actions of the weather are by definition non-agentive, there's a tendency to treat the weird argument as an object, at least syntactically, or as a medio-passive/pseudo-reflexive subject.
Some more comments as food for thought: in English the same pattern is used for weather, temperature of an object, and perception of temperature by a person: to be + adjective (it's hot, it's hot, I'm hot). In Spanish the three are completely different, and there may be an alternative for the weather:
Maybe the difference has to do with the impersonal nature of weather. Está caluroso has an understood subject, but Hace calor does not (*El clima hace calor is ridiculous).
OK, shutting up now... -- Pablo D. Flores ( Talk) 19:21, 1 September 2005 (UTC)
Well, either I'm inspired or delirious, but bear with me a bit more. It is obvious that the violence will continue is a fairly common sentence where the subject (that the violence will continue) has been dislocated (← That this violence will continue is obvious). Is this not also the case with It is raining?
Again, not trying to fit English into Spanish, but in Spanish the answers would be lluvia "rain" and perros y gatos "cats and dogs", respectively, and probably without the slightest hesitation. In English, of course, it is not only perfectly grammatical but also non-weird to say Cats and dogs are raining from the sky, and I believe it'd be rather weird and maybe ungrammatical to say Cats and dogs are being rained by the sky (that is, it'd be weird to treat "cats and dogs" as the direct object and "the sky" as the subject).
Better yet, isn't it grammatical to say A drizzle is raining, even though idiomatically you must prefer A drizzle is falling?
I think the English weather it fills a slot left by a dislocation of a subject that is then deleted, and that this subject is not a source like "the sky" or "the clouds", but a patient (passive entity) like "rain" or "snow" or "drops" or whatever, just as it happens in Spanish, and analog to the Spanish treatment of patientive-subject intransitives like caer "to fall".
This is all and very explicitly original research and I can barely get my head around it myself, so I'm not going to inject this into the article, but I'd like to know whether this makes sense or not.
-- Pablo D. Flores ( Talk) 20:05, 1 September 2005 (UTC)
on dummies:
The definition of "dummy word" given above appears to be at odds with this source.
http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsADummyWord.htm
Can you provide a source for the given definition? Lucidish 00:53, 2 September 2005 (UTC)
on the rest:
I find myself lacking in the proper training to be able to answer much of what's been written here, but there are at least a few things I can reply to.
This may provide some backup to my position: http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=185169 It seems to suggest claims that are very similar to mine with respect to what they call an "anticipatory it". Sadly, I can't tell whether or not the "weather it" is a subclass of the anticipatory it, or get much more than the abstract, since this is a pay service. Lucidish
(Update) I was able to scrounge up a copy of the article. It does indeed provide backup to my claim, though their argument is not nearly as strong as I would like for it to be. Anyway. Here's the relevant section of text:
"..Compare, for instance, the following uses of prop it:
The generally held view that prop it is a more or less meaningless ‘dummy’ is, however, challenged by Bolinger (1977: 77–87), who maintains that it ‘retains at least some value beyond that of plugging a grammatical hole’ (Bolinger, 1977: 67). Bolinger’s discussion builds on the notion of ‘all-encompassing states’ used by Chafe (1970) to describe sentences such as It’s late, It’s Tuesday. According to Chafe (1970: 101) ‘they [all-encompassing states] cover the total environment, not just some object within it’. For Bolinger this is an indication that prop it (or, in his terms, ambient it) does possess some referential value even if its referent is of a very general nature, in this case the ‘environment’ that is central to the whole area."
So this part of the dispute is also necessary to include, at minimum. Lucidish 22:11, 3 September 2005 (UTC)
Hi, I changed this sentence
"Dummy objects are sometimes used to transform intransitive verbs to transitive light verbs from"
Because all the verbs listed, do, make & get are transitive verbs. ( 89.241.239.33 15:09, 15 September 2007 (UTC))
I am not enough of a linguist to be sure, but it seems to me "there" is a dummy pronoun in sentences like "There is nothing to do". If it's not considered a dummy, what is the presumed referent? Randall Bart Talk 22:00, 27 April 2012 (UTC)
Right now paragraph 3 of the lead says:
This is not right. In this example, "it" can be replaced with the exact noun phrase that it refers to:
This is still an example of a dummy pronoun, specifically an example involving extraposition, and could go in that section of the article. In light of the existence of extraposition-motivated dummy pronouns, the first sentence of paragraph 3 needs to be qualified (and the analysis of this example needs to be corrected, or the example replaced with one that fits the analysis). Loraof ( talk) 17:23, 8 January 2015 (UTC)
I have commented on the page on expletive that I think its definition is weak or faulty. Likewise, I think it is hardly right to call a dummy pronoun pleonastic. It is not redundant or superfluous for a native English speaker. It seems to me that here the words expletive and pleonastic are both exhibitions of editorial erudition rather than reliable-source-based reports of ordinary language usage. I think they should both be removed from their place in the lead of this article. Chjoaygame ( talk) 03:40, 7 January 2016 (UTC)
I was wondering if "it" in "How's it going?" is a dummy pronoun. Anyone here knows? Thanks! -- NKohli (WMF) ( talk) 04:46, 5 April 2017 (UTC)
It seems as though this sentence falls in line with the claim in the article attributed to D. L. Bolinger; That in this case, "it" "simply refers to a general state of affairs in the context of the utterance." 49.98.12.132 ( talk) 05:55, 2 March 2022 (UTC)
Is there a reason not to merge this with Syntactic expletive? Clean Copy talk 11:59, 15 July 2017 (UTC)
Some of the examples here are necessary verb arguments in the respective meaning, others represent a subclause at the end of the sentence. The latter might be seen as meaningless dummy, but the former are not completely meaningless, since they are necessary for their verb and its meaning. A real meaningless dummy is the "es" in these German sentences: "Es wurde geraucht." (Contrast with: "Früher wurde öfter geraucht.") "Es kommt ein Sturm." ("Ein Sturm kommt.") "Es flogen tausende Splitter durch die Luft."
And the "it" in "I bought a Sandwich and ate it" may have a lexical meaning, but it just appears for syntactical reasons. Why is it no dummy? 2A0A:A541:5A30:0:B097:9819:83CC:DC5A ( talk) 18:33, 21 February 2024 (UTC)