The Semantics of Pleonastics

Abstract

As has been clear from Chapter 1, pleonastics are a major issue for any theory of subjects, predication or clausal structure. The obligatory presence of nonthematic DPs in subject position with no apparent role in the interpretation of the clause is a challenge for any theory which wants to try and explain what the nature of clausal structure is. And for a compositional theory of interpretation, which assumes that syntactic operations are correlated with semantic operations, the question is what semantic operation could be paired with inserting an obligatory, but meaningless DP in subject position. Depending on the kind of theory, the problem takes a slightly different shape, and suggests a different kind of solution. Recent theories which seriously discuss the issue, in particular Sag (1982), Dowty (1985), Gazdar, Klein, Pullum and Sag (1985) and Chierchia (1989) assume that pleonastic it denotes a dummy or null element ⊥, which Dowty (1985), following Lauri Kartunnen, calls the ‘ugly object’; the semantic correlate of inserting a pleonastic in the subject position is functional application to ⊥. The question is how to motivate such an operation. I am only going to discuss the it pleonastic here: as McCloskey (1991) shows, there has very different properties from it, and needs to be discussed separately.