REVISITING THE SEMANTICS OF THE SENTENCES WITH INITIAL ‘IT’

Abstract

The review of monographic works concerning the impersonal sentences in English shows that in some of them ‘It’ is regarded only as a formal subject. This non-real subject does not indicate any agent of the action. Its appearance is mostly conditioned by language laws, which in the case of English is the fixed word order: S-P. The questions concerning the origin and nature of impersonal sentences are of great interest to the linguists. The impersonal sentences present a kind of exception to the syntactical rule of any language as they contradict to the fact that every sentence should have of a subject and a predicate. Therefore, linguistic investigation of this problem can not be made without seeking aid from logic and psychology, and even philosophy since the results of such an inquiry may help throw light on the relation of grammar to logic. The analyses of some researches in this field reveal that some authors underscore the ambient character of the pronoun “It”. Guided by this point of view, the purpose of this article is to analyze some types of the sentences with the initial “It”, where the ambient meaning acquires certain communicative signification depending on the context it has been used.

Keywords

• Impersonal sentences
• semantic field
• impersonality
• subject
• theme
• rheme

Kaynakça

1. Lejkina A. (1992). Predvarjajushe-vydelitelnyje konstruksijii v sovremennom anglijskom jazyke [Anticipatory-separative constructions in modern English], dissertation abstract, Moscow
2. Recanati F. (2007). It’s raining (somewhere). Linguistics and Philosophy Vol. 30, No. 1, 123-146. Wood L. A. & Kroger R. O. (2000). Doing Discourse Analysis: Methods for Studying Action in Talk and Text. SAGE Publications.