The Loss of Old English Null Expletive ‘it’
نویسندگان
چکیده
منابع مشابه
Referential, Quasi, and Expletive Subjects in L2 English of Persian Speakers
The present study sought to investigate the acquisition of referential, quasi and expletive subject pronouns, three different types of obligatory subjects in English, by adult Persian speaking L2 learners of English at different stages of L2 acquisition. A Grammaticality Judgment Test and a Translation Test were designed and developed to elicit the participants' knowledge of obligatory subjects...
متن کاملEnglish 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...
متن کاملOn the Efficiency and Adequacy of L2 Instruction and Input
The present study was planned to investigate the efficiency of explicit teaching and adequacy of the L2 learners' exposure to L2 input in academic contexts in Iran. The case at hand was the acquisition of referential, quasi and expletive subject pronouns, as three different types of obligatory subjects in English. 96 Iranian EFL learners were selected from two universities in Isfahan. They were...
متن کاملThe Typology of Expletive THERE
In this article I propose an alternative account of expletive THERE based on the theory that formal features may move overtly at PF. Specifically, I argue that the «inadequacies» of expletive THERE alluded to in Chomsky (1993: 33) are the result of the fact that THERE is simply a collection of formal features, an «alternative» spell-out of the Case and Agreement features of a lexical NP and has...
متن کاملAn Inquiry into Existential Constructions
Existential constructions play an important role in the development of Generative Grammar. Their special natures urge linguists to pay painstaking effort to give them a unified account. At first we have a brief review of the relevant study of these constructions and examine their strong points and weakness. On the basis of their study, we assume that in existential constructions of SVO language...
متن کامل