Talk:Dummy pronoun

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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)

I'd rather delete the relevant section on Expletive (which can stay as is or become a disambig page), and move everything to dummy pronoun. FWIW, I wrote a part of it, as well as pro-drop language and related articles, and I'd never ever heard of an "expletive" being a name for a dummy pronoun. I'm not a native English speaker; my first language is Spanish, and "expletivo" is a (very rarely used) adjective that means precisely "pleonastic". There's no informal equivalent for "dummy pronoun" in Spanish. Where I learned my linguistics (CONLANG-L, in English obviously) there's a huge number of amateurs and professionals in the field, and "dummy pronoun" was all I ever heard. --Pablo D. Flores 03:20, 30 Apr 2005 (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.

• Crystal (Dict of Linguistics and Phonetics, 3rd ed 1991): Dummy, but with a cross-reference from expletive (nothing for pleonastic)
• Trask (Dict of Grammatical Terms in English 1993): Dummy, but with a cross-ref from expletive. Trask lists pleonastic with a slightly different meaning (see below).
• Haegeman and Guéron (English Grammar 1999): Expletive, but with a cross-ref from dummy (no mention of pleonastic)
• Radford (Minimalist Syntax 2004): Expletive, but with a cross-ref from dummy (no mention of pleonastic)
• Huddleston and Pullum (Cambridge Grammar of the English Language 2002): Dummy, with expletive and pleonastic only used for other, pronoun-irrelevant senses.

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)

Contents 1 It's raining! 1.1 Defining a dummy pronoun, and comments from a pro-drop lang POV 1.2 And he goes on and on... 2 Reply 2.1 Round Two

[edit] It's raining!

"It's raining" does not contain any dummy. "It" is the sky. Lucidish 04:02, 15 August 2005 (UTC)

No, it's not. If you replace a pronoun by a noun, the result should be grammatical and sensible, but "The sky is raining" is nonsensical. Also, weather verbs are not the only instances of dummy pronoun usage in English. In "It is here that he spoke", "it" is clearly a dummy syntactic filler. --Pablo D. Flores 15:02, 15 August 2005 (UTC)

Then I'm afraid we must be speaking different languages. According to every intuition and rule I have ever learned of English, "The sky is raining" is perfectly sensible and intelligible. Moreover, I dare you to walk up to anyone (who hasn't choked down well-meaning dogma) and say those words. I very much suspect that they will not try to correct you with grammatical umbrage.

I have no quarrel with the concept of the dummy word itself. IE, as referenced above, in "It's a mystery why...", "it" seems to have little meaning. It's just that the raining example is false. Lucidish

I'm a native speaker of English and I side with Pablo. But I don't do so completely: it [dummy!] seems to me that the "weather it" may not be the same as the regular expletive it. I'm going to reword this accordingly within the next few minutes (unless WP is recalcitrant). -- Hoary 08:05, August 21, 2005 (UTC)

Thank you for the edit. But I'm not sure why you would come to the conclusions you have. It would help if you indicated how it is you think the sentence "The sky / clouds are raining" is unintelligible. Lucidish 16:00, 21 August 2005 (UTC)

Right then, I've made some changes.

• It's generally (though not universally) agreed that in English pronouns are determiners, not nouns. (Note that where "it" is your school, "I visited it last week" could be replaced by "I visited the/my school last week", not "I visited school last week".) But while true for English, this isn't true for all languages.

• The statement in the older version dummy pronouns are typically used only in simple transitive statements of the It's raining variety is pretty mind-boggling. First, even in English, they're not typically used in such "statements" (clauses?). Secondly, It's raining isn't transitive.

• In the previous version, we read: Of course, these terms [sc. terms such as "make it"] have simply arisen as arbitrary truncations of longer phrases, and this is by no means a formal process; the common meaning of make, for instance, is not in any way related to the definition of make it, the latter deriving from a now-obsolete transitive expression. This is odd: (i) how might formality (however defined) be expected? (ii) Pretty obviously, the make of make a model airplane is unrelated; this is instead the light verb ("make out", "make over", "make off with the money", "make a scene", "make up"); "meaningful" make is probably less common than these. (iii) What is this "now-obsolete transitive expression"? ("Make love", perhaps? But that's not obsolete.) Not knowing how to correct this chunk, I've simply deleted it.

• The discussion of objects implied verbal objects, and indeed the whole thing was about verbal arguments. I've added a mention of prepositional objects. -- Hoary 12:47, August 21, 2005 (UTC)

Ah, just saw that... anyway, "object" tends to be understood as verbal object, unless otherwise stated.

I'm not completely sure about this, but I think weather verbs and the like are one of the linguistic paragons of dummy pronoun usage. I really can't speak for English since I'm not a native speaker, but if the it in it is raining is not a truly dummy pronoun, I don't know what is. I agree that Hoary's example is probably safer, though. I'm going to think about some more (cleft sentences come to mind) and then see if I can bring in a summarized comparison from pro-drop language. --Pablo D. Flores 17:32, 21 August 2005 (UTC)

It's a normal pronoun, standing for "the sky", "the clouds", "the temperature", etc. "The clouds are snowing", "the clouds are raining", "the temperature is cold", etc. are all sensible expressions. Weather verbs need to be understood as ordinary verbs with contextually implied subjects.

The only peculiar thing about expressions like

(1) "The sky is raining"

that I can think of is that they seem to be missing a passive agent. For instance, the expression

(2)"The boy is throwing a ball"

seems okay, since it has this passive agent ("the ball"). But the expression

(3)"The boy is throwing"

(similar to 1) seems very strange. The difference between them is that "raining" implies the passive subject (rain), and so the passive subject can be ommitted, since including it would be redundant; while "throwing" doesn't imply "a ball", so it needs to be included. But this point seems quite far and away from the issue of dummy words.

In your defense, I've seen this fundamental error in textbooks (i.e. Daniel Bonevac's "Deduction"), so I'm positive that it's not carelessness on your part. Rather, I think it's received dogma that's obviously and demonstrably false and which Wiki ought to take pains to avoid. Lucidish 19:30, 21 August 2005 (UTC)

Hmmm... Common usage or traditional linguistics ideas might be incorrect, but they don't have to be called dogma. I'm no professional linguist so I can't tell, really. I have no problem with the page as it is now, but I'm interested in the subject and find that weather verbs with explicit subjects are rather weird. Can you provide a source that justifies the above? Because otherwise it looks like original research. --Pablo D. Flores 20:24, 21 August 2005 (UTC)

I wish I could, but I'm just writing out what I know by intuition as an English language speaker. I've been asking my friends, and while they all admit that the sentence "The clouds are raining" sounds a bit funny, they tend to attribute this to the fact that by convention nobody bothers mentioning the clouds (since we all know where rain comes from!). And I'm familiar, not with linguistics, but with logic and philosophy in the main; my familiarity with the linguistics literature is not decisive. And no searches of Google or my linguistics abstracts database (CSA Illumina) yeild any non-Wiki-contrived sources about English, when using keywords "dummy word" or "pleonastic" and "weather verb".

It's just that seeing this show up in textbooks, for me, is sort of like waking up one morning and hearing tenured professors start talking about how 2+2=6. It's just one of those things that is so absurd on its face that I can't call it anything but "dogma". So if I'm wrong, I'd like an explicit reason for why people think so. I guess that might make this issue, technically, original research. But until I can get an honest and objective technical linguist to look at this matter, then, even if it's just as a courtesy, I'd like the page to stay as it is (without the equivalence drawn between the pronouns preceding weather verbs and pleonastics.) It doesn't seem to make much of a difference anyway, and if I'm wrong for reasons that I can't presently imagine, then you can always revert. Lucidish 22:21, 21 August 2005 (UTC)

Update: I've had one prof confirm that they don't believe the "weather it" to be a dummy word because they think that it can be referred to by a "PRO" (an anaphor that is an invisible pronoun ) later on in the sentence, as in the sentence "It's raining and [it's] snowing"; and this doesn't normally happen with dummy words. I think this is a pretty indirect challenge, but it's something at least. Also, however, this indicates that the "pro-form" is not just anaphoric, but also exophoric (or referential), as in appealing to something extralinguistic (like the sky, clouds). Lucidish 16:26, 1 September 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Defining a dummy pronoun, and comments from a pro-drop lang POV

Let us see:

"A dummy pronoun is a type of pronoun used when a particular argument of a verb (or preposition) is nonexistent, unknown, irrelevant, already understood, or otherwise not to be spoken of directly, but a reference to the argument (a pronoun) is nevertheless syntactically required."

With the definition given above, saying that it in It is raining is a dummy pronoun is strictly correct, since either:

1. the thing referenced by it is nonexistent (which depends on the semantics of the verb), or
2. the subject is the sky or the clouds, and therefore obviously "irrelevant" and "already understood" (which explains why nobody actually uses it!).

The contention comes next, when an example is given, and then the text says:

"In 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."

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:

Están lloviendo ranas. "It's raining frogs."

Está nevando helado de frutilla. "It's snowing strawberry icecream."

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.

Están cayendo gotas. "Drops are falling."

Murió mucha gente. "Many people died."

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".

Está aclarando = Está aclarando el cielo = El cielo está aclarando. (by descending order of commonness)

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:

Hace calor lit. "(It) does heat", but also (El clima) está caluroso "(The weather) is hot"

Está caliente lit. "It is hot"

Tengo calor lit. "I have heat" or Estoy con calor "I am with heat"

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)

[edit] And he goes on and on...

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?

1. Suppose you said "It's raining", and someone asked, "What is raining?". Would you answer, "The sky/clouds, of course", or, "Rain, of course"?

1. Now try this too: You say "It's raining cats and dogs". If someone asked "What is raining?", would you reply, "I said it's raining cats and dogs", or, "The sky/clouds"?

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)

[edit] Reply

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

"A dummy word is a grammatical unit that has no meaning, but completes a sentence to make it grammatical."

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.

a) I think "the weather", though itself a generalized state of affairs and not an agent, can be used to refer to or otherwise imply an agent (in this case, clouds).

b) I think it would be totally proper to answer "the clouds are raining" if asked "What's raining?". But it would be equally proper to answer "rain" to that same question. That's because the question is ambiguous: we don't know if they're inquiring into the nature of the subject or the passive object. (Assuming that the full translation of "It's raining" would be something like, "<noun> is raining <object>"; that we can treat <noun> plausibly as "clouds", and <object> as "rain"; and that the reconstructed sentence would be "The clouds are raining rain".) Lucidish

The problem, precisely, is that if you assume that there is an underlying structure [noun] is raining [object], then from the very start you deny the possibility that the pronoun before the verb is in fact meaningless, i. e. a dummy word. If the pronoun refers to a noun and you can say what this noun is, then by definition it's not a dummy pronoun. My contention is that (maybe) the verb is really impersonal, i. e. its subject is truly a dummy word, not meant to mean anything but only appearing there to fill a syntactic slot.

The definition given at the start of the article is not sourced appropriately, I know; it just covers what I think are the features of what linguists call "dummy pronoun", based on my amateur experience on the matter. I do know it's not completely wrong or misleading, though it probably needs a different form. The glossary definition above, OTOH, is a bit too vague, but in any case, note that the very first example of dummy word given below in the source is the it in It is raining.

--Pablo D. Flores (Talk) 02:50, 2 September 2005 (UTC)

I do not "assume" it. I point out that these instances are grammatically correct, and infer the structure (in English) on the basis of that. If I ran into a wall of native counter-intuition and empirical counter-evidence that suggested the sentence were ungrammatical -- instead of questionable assertions whose force is attributable to the simple novelty of the utterance -- then I would not make any claims about its structure in this way. I have not.

Moreover, I have said what features the pronoun has. It is an exophor, which can plausibly designate the noun "clouds". For a dummy word, you couldn't even plausibly fill in the gap with anything. You can fill it here.

I do note the example, but it is wrong. Lucidish 03:04, 2 September 2005 (UTC)

If you bring up a source with a definition you agree with, and you disagree on the example, then maybe you're not getting the definition right. The linguistics lexicon is profusely sourced, and I expect that the examples are as good as the definitions.

I'm not questioning your native intuition; in fact I'm just pointing out why I think what I think, no more and no less. When I said you "assumed" above, it was because you said "assuming that...", and I wrote it conditionally, just as you did.

The reason I gave all those examples in Spanish was that, being the case that Sp is pro-drop and has truly impersonal weather verbs, the idea I was trying to convey might be clearer. In English, my opinion (which at least some linguists appear to share) is that it in it is raining is an artifact of syntax, not a referent of anything; moreover, I think your perception of this it is being clouded precisely by the fact that you have a native intuition that all sentences need a subject, and since in most cases the subject is an entity of some kind, you imagine this it to represent such an entity. This is not an attack on your intellectual capacity — myself, I'm studying Japanese, and believe me, everything seems to work backwards from common sense there sometimes.

I'll do some more research and then note what I found, if anything. --Pablo D. Flores (Talk) 10:44, 2 September 2005 (UTC)

Ah, I understand where you're coming from. Sorry. It was a poor choice of words. I should have wrote "given that...", because I had provided an argument previously.

The definition of "dummy" is correct on the source given; it's their interpretation of the "weather it" that is wrong. On that note, Chomsky provides a "PRO" interpretation in some of his works, so that is a counter-source to the dummy weather-it interpretation. So while my reasons for dispute may be original research (or at least it seems that way until I find research to indicate otherwise), there is actual research which disputes the classification of the "weather it" as a dummy on different grounds.

I get a vague sense of where you're coming from (I don't know what a "pro-drop" language is), and from a detached standpoint I suppose I could accept the possibility that I'm just preaching out the features of my idiolect instead of formulating a conventional notion of English. By the same token, linguists might have become so caught up in complicated but rational interpretations of their work that they've committed themselves to nonsense.

Surely it should be evident that these possibilities are moot. Science is about tests, and the test is empirical. Go out into the world, use the sentence "The clouds are raining", and see how many people correct you. Lucidish 18:25, 2 September 2005 (UTC)

See Pro-drop language for the definition (null-subject language too, though I don't like that name). If there are two views on the matter, then both should be expressed; could you tell me exactly where and how Chomsky said that? I've also read somewhere that some linguists believe that the it in it is obvious that... might not be dummy either. Too technical for me. In defense of the non-empiric method, I can only say that if in Spanish you say El cielo está lloviendo "The sky is raining", people will squint and frown at you, but they won't correct you as if you had made a grammatical mistake, because the structure looks correct (impersonal verbs are a tiny bunch), and it makes sense (unless you change "sky" into something else not having to do with weather). "Making sense" as a test for a scientific theory is not enough, though.

I'd like to see the weather it in the article, with a warning that that view is not shared by every linguist. --Pablo D. Flores (Talk) 19:00, 2 September 2005 (UTC)

Chomsky, Noam (1981) Lectures on Government and Binding. Dordrecht: Foris., cited in http://www.ling.helsinki.fi/sky/julkaisut/SKY2004/Alba-Salas.pdf.

I have no objections to mentioning the weather-it so long as the dispute is noted.

But still, this argument doesn't satisfy me at all. It seems like all this is more like patent nonsense than it is any original research on my part. I don't know how else to describe it. And I really disagree. When it comes to semantics, "making sense" is just about all there is. Lucidish 21:13, 2 September 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Round Two

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:

1. It’s half past ten
2. It’s raining again
3. It’s getting dark
4. It is Saturday

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)