Nonreferential It

INTRODUCTION
Despite
their common occurrence, nonreferential it and there can cause difficulties for ESL/EFL students. and there had gone by many names: nonreferential, dummy and empty. This means that these subjects appear to have no clearly definable antecedent. of other languages that do not require a surface subject the way English does, may produce sentences that are ungrammatical inEnglish
it
Speakers
EXAMPLES:
Speakers
of Spanish and Italian may say: * is raining. Speakers of Cantonese might translate from their language to English and say: * Rain is plentiful. Speakers of topic-comment languages such as Japanese may preserve their topic-comment structure of their native language and instead of producing sentences with nonreferential there, such as: There are27 students in Taros school. They produce sentences such as: * Taros school is 27 students. * Taros school students are 27. * in Taros school students are 27.
FORM
Nonreferential
it fills the subject position in a sentence, always taking a singular verb, usually be.
> It is raining pretty hard. > It was a very blustery autumn day. > It is not so far in Portland.
MEANING
Nonreferential
it is ambient (Chafe, 1970 and Bolinger, 1977) it is grammatically necessary but lexically vague. meaning of ambient it derives from the rest of the sentence, which makes it clear to the listener or reader what is being discussed.
Ambient
The
FOUND COMMONLY IN THE EXPRESSIONS OF:

Time:
* It is six-thirty. * It is August 28. * It is early. * It will be my birthday.

Distance:
* It is about 100 miles to Boston. * It is just two stops on the Metro.
Weather:
* It is cloudy. * It is freezing. * Its getting dark. * Its going to snow.

Environment:
* It is never crowded at the Manila Hotel. * It gets a little rowdy on the ninth floor.
At
first glance, these its may appear to be referential. We could say that in the sentence It is six-thirty.
The it is a personal pronoun replacing the noun phrase the time. The time is six-thirty.
However, this analysis wont explain the it in an associated wh-question: What time is it? * What time is the time?
Same
anomaly holds for other corresponding questions, for example:
It/The day is Saturday. What day is it? * What day is the day? It is impossible to find referents for some cases of it. It is raining. What is raining? (?The clouds are raining. *The rain is raining. ?The weather is raining.)
For
both these reasons, linguist conclude that the nonreferential it takes its meaning from the ambience/environment in which it occurs. 1. nonreferential it requires no antecedent or anaphoric referent. 2. there is no conceivable referent for the it.
We can therefore acknowledge the rationale for calling it a dummy-- its meaning is too unspecific to articulate, and speakers have no clear conception of its referent. But that precisely is its crucial semantic property (Langacker 1991:377)
THERE IN ORAL DISCOURSE

Sasaki
(1991) has examined the use and distribution of there for spoken American English. His data were taken from oral transcripts representing three different speech genres: informal conversations, radio show discourse and oral narratives. Transcripts were analyze for topic continuity using a modified version of Givons method (1984) of measuring referential distance.
Logical
subjects in sentences with there tended to have low topic in continuity. Although the logical subjects introduced specific new information, it was often subcategory of some previously mentioned topic. The elements following the logical subject of nonreferential there sentences were found to have high topic continuity; that is, their central referents had been previously mentioned in the discourse. In this way, the postlogic element was functioning as what Fox (1987) calls an anchor or a linker between new topic introduced by the logical subject and the preceding part of the discourse.
THERE IN WRITTEN DISCOURSE

Huckin
and Pesante (1988) examined a corpus of 100, 000 words taken from 29 written English texts representing a variety of genres, ranging from reference books to magazines. They found four purposes for there in written discourse. The basic function was to assert existence, the other three being more specific extensions from the notion of asserting existence: 1. presenting new information, either as setting for a new topic or 2. making isolated topic shifts and 3. using there sentences to summarize.
Ahlers
(1991)building on the works of Huckin and Pesante and Sasaki, examined 100 tokens of there gathered from 18 sourcesundergraduate college readings from a variety of disciplines. He found that there were two primary ways that there functions in the academic expository writing: 1. general-particular is one where a new topic is introduced in a general statement beginning with there, which is followed by clauses which offer supporting details or elaboration. 2. listing

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INTRODUCTION

FOUND COMMONLY IN THE EXPRESSIONS OF:

* It is six-thirty. * It is August 28. * It is early. * It will be my birthday.

* It is about 100 miles to Boston. * It is just two stops on the Metro.

* It is cloudy. * It is freezing. * Its getting dark. * Its going to snow.

anomaly holds for other corresponding questions, for example:

THERE IN ORAL DISCOURSE

THERE IN WRITTEN DISCOURSE

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