English Expletive Constructions Are Not Infected

English Expletive Constructions Are Not Infected

Sobin (1997) proposes an analysis of several ‘‘prestige’’ constructions of English under which they result from grammatical viruses. Counter to his claim, I argue that plural agreement in expletive constructions introduced by there results not from a virus but from the grammar of English, because it lacks signature properties of viruses. I show that the flat agreement seen in expletive construc...

Transitive Expletive Constructions and the Object Shift Parameter

3 Icelandic Expletive Constructions and the Distribution of Subject Types

The Loss of Old English Null Expletive ‘it’

English prepositional passive constructions

As noted by Huddleston and Pullum (2002, p. 1433), prepositional passives can be divided into two classes, depending on the syntactic function of the PP. In Type I prepositional passives, the PP is a complement whose prepositional head is idiomatically selected by the verb, as in (1b); in Type II prepositional passives as in (1c), the preposition is not part of a verbal idiom. Huddleston and Pu...