Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-dk4vv Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T00:47:39.124Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Ambient it is meaningful too

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

Dwight Bolinger
Affiliation:
Harvard University

Extract

In one of the many insightful passages in his Meaning and the structure of language (Chafe, 1970), Wallace Chafe characterizes sentences like It's hot, It's late, and It's Tuesday as referring to ‘all-encompassing states’. ‘They cover,’ he says, ‘the total environment, not just some object within it’ (101). His treatment, in common with most others – but in his case partly because of the centrality of the verb in his System – denies any value to it: ‘it need not reflect anything at all in the semantic structure’. I believe that the notion of ambience is correct, though that of totality must be qualified; but I think that not only is it more than an empty surface element: it has as its referent precisely the ‘environment’ that is central to the whole idea. There is a hint of this notion in a recent observation by Arthur Schwartz (1972: 70–71) concerning it seems: ‘the surface it is not really a pronominal substitute for the proposition, but closer to the impersonal situational it of It is cold today or It is crowded in here’.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1973

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Bolinger, D. L. (1961). Syntactic blends and other matters. Lg 37. 366381.Google Scholar
Bolinger, D. L. (1970). The lexical value of it. Working papers in linguistics (University of Hawaii) 2:8. 5776.Google Scholar
Chafe, W. L. (1970). Meaning and the structure of language, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Schwartz, A. (1972). Constraints on movement transformations. JL 8. 3585.Google Scholar