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Dummy Words" Have No Meaning
But
They Do Have a Grammatical Function
Updated
December 06, 2017
Examples
and Observations
"That first winter, it
rains and rains as if we have moved to some foreign place, away from the
desert; it rains and it rains, and the water comes up to the back
step and I think it will enter the house."
(Beth Alvorado, Anthropologies: A Family Memoir. University Of Iowa
Press, 2011)
"What do you want out of
me? A marriage counselor? All I know is this: nobody's very big in the first
place, and it looks to me like everybody spends their whole life tearing
everybody else down."
(Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Viking Press, 1962)
"Everything was so still.
Occasionally there were the hums and clicks of a lawnmower or the
shrieks of a band of children heading home from school. There were the
insects and the birds. It was a straightforward, simple life she had
chosen."
(Alice Elliott Dark, "In the Gloaming." The New Yorker, 1994)
"Do" as the Dummy Operator
and "It" as a Dummy Subject
"[T]he verb do, used as an auxiliary, is often called the dummy
operator because it has no meaning of its own but exists simply to fill the
'slot' of operator when an operator is needed to form (for example) negative or
interrogative sentences. In a similar way, it
can be called a dummy subject when it fills the subject slot in sentences like:
It's a pity that they wasted so much time."
(Geoffrey N. Leech, A Glossary of English Grammar. Edinburgh
University Press, 2006)
Dummy Pronouns
- "There are also pronouns that don't mean anything at all. Dummy
pronouns, they're called, and we come across them all the time (you read
one in the previous sentence). They're those pronouns that exist only because
the English language demands that each sentence
contain a subject: the it in 'It's raining' or
the there in 'There is a shed in my back yard.' (Note: the there
only works as an example of a dummy pronoun if I am not pointing to a shed, and
am nowhere near my back yard.)"
(Jessica Love, "They Get to Me." The American Scholar, Spring
2010)
- "In the case of reference, the meaning of a dummy word can be
determined by what is imparted before or after the occurrence of the dummy
word. In general, the dummy word is a pronoun.
I see John is here. He hasn't
changed a bit.
She certainly has changed. No, behind John. I mean Karin."
(J. Renkema, Discourse Studies.
John Benjamins, 2004)
"There" as a Dummy Subject
"By using there as a dummy subject, the writer or speaker
can delay introducing the real subject of the sentence. There is called
a dummy subject . . . because it has no meaning in itself--its function is to
put the real subject in a more prominent position."
(Sara Thorne, Mastering Advanced English Language. Palgrave Macmillan,
2008)
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