A dummy pronoun, also known as an expletive pronoun, is a deictic pronoun that fulfills a syntactical requirement without providing a contextually explicit meaning of its referent.[1] As such, it is an example of exophora.
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.[2]
A dummy pronoun is used when a particular verb argument (or preposition) is nonexistent – it could also be unknown, irrelevant, already understood, or otherwise taboo (as in naming taboo) – but when a reference to the argument (a pronoun) is nevertheless syntactically required. For example, in the phrase "It is obvious that the violence will continue", the term 'it' is a dummy pronoun, not referring to any agent. Unlike a regular pronoun of English, it cannot be replaced by any noun phrase.[3]
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 (referring to the sandwich).
- ^ Matthews, Peter Hugo (2003). The concise Oxford dictionary of linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- ^ Pountain, Christopher (31 March 2020). "Copulas in the Romance Languages". Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Linguistics. doi:10.1093/acrefore/9780199384655.013.641.
- ^ Seppänen, Aimo (1 November 2002). "On Analysing the Pronoun IT". English Studies. 83 (5): 442–462. doi:10.1076/enst.83.5.442.8682.