Talk:Dummy pronoun

message: 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)
thread_title: Personal pronoun or impersonal pronoun?

message: 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)
thread_title: Dummy vs. expletive

message: 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:
# It’s half past ten
# It’s raining again
# It’s getting dark
# 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)
replies: text: As a native speaker of a null subject language, it sounds utterly ridiculous to me to suggest that Chove "actually means" that the sky is raining, or the environment is raining, or whatever. But, hey, maybe Mr. Bolinger knows something about my language that I don't... FilipeS (talk) 00:12, 28 December 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Round Two 

message: 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)
thread_title: Intransitive verbs tranformation

message: 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)
thread_title:  There is another dummy pronoun 

message: Right now paragraph 3 of the lead says:
:For instance, 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 (except for, rhetorically permitting, something like 'the state of affairs' or 'the fact of the matter'.)
This is not right. In this example, "it" can be replaced with the exact noun phrase that it refers to:
:That the violence will continue is obvious.
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)
replies: text: I think the foregoing comment is mistaken. The comment claims, in my view mistakenly, to "replace". No, it reconstructs the sentence. The criticised text rightly offers "the state of affairs" as an exceptional version of replacement.Chjoaygame (talk) 17:58, 8 January 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Incorrectly analyzed example 

message: 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)
thread_title:  expletive and pleonastic 

message: 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)
thread_title:  How's it going? 

message: Is there a reason not to merge this with Syntactic expletive? Clean Copytalk 11:59, 15 July 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Merger?