Dummy pronoun


A dummy pronoun, also called an expletive pronoun or pleonastic pronoun, is a pronoun used to fulfill the syntactical requirements without providing explicit meaning.
Dummy pronouns are used in many Germanic languages, including German and English. Pronoun-dropping languages such as Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, and Turkish do not require dummy pronouns.
A dummy pronoun is used when a particular verb argument is nonexistent but when a reference to the argument is nevertheless syntactically required. For example, in the phrase "It is obvious that the violence will continue", it is a dummy pronoun, not referring to any agent. Unlike a regular pronoun of English, it cannot be replaced by any noun phrase.
The term dummy pronoun refers to the function of a word in a particular sentence, not a property of individual words. For example, it in the example from the previous paragraph is a dummy pronoun, but it in the sentence "I bought a sandwich and ate it" is a referential pronoun.

Dummy subjects

Weather ''it''

In the phrase "it is raining—", the verb to rain is usually considered semantically impersonal, even though it appears as syntactically intransitive; in this view, the required it is to be considered a dummy word.

Dissenting views

However, there have been a few objections to this interpretation. Noam Chomsky has argued that the it employed as the subject of English weather verbs can control the subject of an adjunct clause, just like a "normal" subject. For example, compare:
If this analysis is accepted, then the "weather it" is to be considered a "quasi- argument" and not a dummy word.
Some linguists such as D. L. Bolinger go even further, claiming that the "weather it" simply refers to a general state of affairs in the context of the utterance. In this case, it would not be a dummy word at all. Possible evidence for this claim includes exchanges such as:

Raising verbs

Other examples of semantically empty it are found with raising verbs in "unraised" counterparts. For example:

Extraposition

Dummy it can also be found in extraposition constructions in English, such as the following:

Dummy objects

In English, dummy object pronouns tend to serve an ad hoc function, applying with less regularity than they do as subjects. Dummy objects are sometimes used to transform transitive verbs to transitive light verbs form; e.g., do → do it, "to engage in sexual intercourse"; make → ', "to achieve success"; get → ', "to comprehend". Prepositional objects are similar; e.g., ', "up to date"; ', "dazed" or "not thinking". All of these phrases, of course, can also be taken literally. For instance:

Dummy predicates

It has been proposed that elements like expletive there in existential sentences and pro in inverse copular sentences play the role of dummy predicate rather than dummy subject, so that the postverbal noun phrase would rather be the embedded subject of the sentence.

Gender

A dummy pronoun may be conventionally of a particular gender, even though there is no gendered noun with which it must agree.