What is it?

Abstract

Using data pertaining to pronominal usages from Chinese, French, German and other languages, I argue that the dummy subject or the expletive pronoun it and the third-person singular pronoun it are actually the same syntactic placeholder in English. They are not accidental homonyms. Instead, they both function as expletives to satisfy the Extended Projection Principle, ban against null non generic objects, and the Animacy Hierarchy. I also propose that the English gender-neutral inanimate pronoun it is highly marked cross linguistically, as a result of English being one of the minority non pro-drop languages while having impoverished gender-marking features that are confined only to its pronoun system. I hypothesize that no language has exclusive pronouns reserved only for referring to entities of low animacy. Lastly, I demonstrate that Chinese is not a radical or perfect pro-drop language, as many linguists have proposed. If expletive objects that are required in the disposal ba structure are taken into consideration, Chinese needs dummy objects even at the cost of violating the Animacy Hierarchy. I categorize such object expletive pronouns as weak pronouns, similar to the it in the English extrapositional structure, e.g., it is nice to sing.