Dummy Subjects in English: A Grammatical Analysis

Aqeel Kadhom Hussein, Aqeel Mohsin Abbood Al-Hussein

Abstract


In fact, any sentence in the language that has a subject is the one who does the action. The verb, the doer of a language, tells us who has already done the action that was described by the action as the initial element that begins a sentence grammatically. There are two types of subjects in the English language, which is the language in question: actual subject, which performs the action, and dummy subject, which fills the position of the real subject and has a grammatical function but no semantic significance.

The study focuses on the syntactic analysis of dummy, expletive, or empty subjects that lack the qualities of real people. Dummy subjects are also known as the sentence's doer, and they are just one of several issues that weaken the phrase by making it unclear or opaque. The study starts with a look at the concept of the subject in general, then moves on to dummy subjects, which are subjects that just fill the subject's position to provide a grammatical purpose without any semantic function. The study looks at the two dummy subjects "it" and "there" in an English sentence and how they may appear with different verbs. The incorrect usage of the dummy subject "there" with the singular verb "be" is criticized in the study.

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.5296/ijl.v14i4.20263

Copyright (c) 2022 Aqeel Kadhom Hussein, Aqeel Mohsin Abbood Al-Hussein

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