A descriptive overview

Introduction

The purpose of this chapter is to summarize the most important facts about expletive constructions mentioned in the preceding chapters and then to add some features to give a more comprehensive picture. Expletives have figured extensively in the modern syntactic literature because they offer interesting opportunities for crosslinguistic comparison: they are similar in many respects but display interesting differences in others and thus raise intriguing descriptive and theoretical questions (see, e.g., Vikner 1995a; Jonas 1996a; Svenonius 2002).

Types of expletive constructions in Icelandic

The term ‘expletive construction’ is normally used about constructions where a semantically empty (or at least nearly-empty) element appears in a position where an argument would be expected, most frequently the subject position (or clause-initial position). The following is a representative list of expletive constructions in Icelandic, concentrating for the moment on constructions with the overt expletive element það ‘there, it’. Although there is no lexical difference between ‘there’-type expletives (or ‘true expletives’) and ‘it’-type expletives (or ‘quasi arguments’) in Icelandic, I will usually vary the translation depending on the type assumed to be involved. Most of the constructions listed below have figured to some extent in the preceding discussion and I am not taking any stand on the question about their alleged or real differences by listing them under different names here (see also Halldór Ármann Sigurðsson 1989:163–4; Höskuldur Thráinsson 2005:336ff.):