There Appeared a Dummy Subject Expletives throughout the History of the English

Cerro de Miguel, M., Fernndez Chana, M. & Gonzlez de la Higuera Rojo, S.

miriam.cerro@estudiante.uam.es, marta.fernandezchana@estudiante.uam.es & sergio.gonzalezhi@estudiante.uam.es

Introduction
The typological shift undergone by English, both in morpho-syntactic and phonological terms, could be regarded as one of the most decisive and remarkable changes in the history of the language. Leaving aside the phonological sphere, the change from a synthetic structure to an analytic one is responsible of most of the differences between English and other Germanic and Indo-European languages. The main characteristic of this process is the loss of inflections and the fixity of, and reliance on, syntax in order to provide constituents with meaning.

HEL Examples (The Bible)

Existential There:
PDE (1901): Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters King James Bible (1611): Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters Wycliffes Bible (1380): Be maad a firmament in the myddel of waters King Alfreds Bible (900): Gewure nu fstnys tomiddes am wterum Dummy It: PDE (1901): God had not caused it to rain upon the earth Kings James Bible (1611): the LORD God had not caused it to raine vpon the earth
Figure 1. Percentage of Dummy Theres in HEL (Adapted from Breivik (1991)

Objectives
The main objectives of this research are both synchronic and diachronic: To provide a description of the history of expletives from Old English until Present Day English (there and it). To analyze the main causes of their appearance To show the structures that different languages have to express these constructions.

Wycliffes Bible (1380): The Lord God forsothe had not reyned vpon the erthe King Alfreds Bible (900): God solice ne sende nnne ren ofer eoran a gyt

Causes
The main reason for dummy subjects to appear in English may be summarized in Breiviks (ibid.) words: a compromise between pragmatics and syntax. Both elements are used when the notional subject is at the end of the clause (Shopen (2007) and Hewings and Hewings (2005) and, only dummy it, when the verb is argumentless (Hewings and Hewings (ibid.). Therefore, as word order was increasingly fixed, they felt the need (c.f. Chinese) to have an element in subject position to remark that this place in the sentence was empty. Why there? Yang (2010) and Huumos (2003) cognitive model: grammaticalization of a locative element since it refers to a location (however abstract this may be). Why it? Already genderless element existent in the paradigm that motivated analogy.

Typological Comparison
Finnish existential (agglutinative): Tulkoon kaartuva kansi vesien vliin (haya/ tapa-curvada / aguas/ entre) Spanish existential (inflective): Haya una bveda en medio de las aguas Chinese existential (isolating): (agua /las/ entre/ obligacin/ HABER/ cielo/aire)

Diachronic description
Both types of expletives are already found in OE (see Breivik (1991) for existential there and Denison (1993) for impersonal it). However, They were sporadic and mostly in main clauses (ibid.). This may show that it was already an on-going change due to the general tendency that changes occur firstly in root clauses and afterwards in embedded ones (Campbell, 1991). As inflections were lost and the SVO pattern reinforced, both subjects became frequent (Figure 1) and, in PDE, compulsory.

Conclusion
Historical description can explain arbitrary synchronic data and give insights into the nature of languages and how human conceptualize reality.
References
Breivik, L.E. 1991. On the Typological Status of OE. In D., Kastovsky (ed.). Historical English Syntax. New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Campbell, L. 1991. Some Grammaticalization Changes in Estonian and their Implications. In E., Traugott and B., Heine (eds.). Approaches to Grammaticalization. Amsterdam: John Benjamin Publishing Company. Denison, D. 1993. English Historical Syntax: Verbal Constructions. London: Longman. Hewings, A. and M., Hewings. 2005. Grammar and Context: An Advanced Resource Book. New York: Routledge. Shopen, T. 2007. Language Typology and Syntactic Description. Volume 1: Clause Structure. Second Edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Huumo, T. 2003. Incremental Existence: The World According to Finnish Existential Sentences. In Linguistics. 41/3: 461 493. Yang, L. 2010. A Cognitive Analysis of the English Existential Construction from the perspective of Iconicity. In Journal of Language teaching and Research. 1/4: 505 511.