LoginExpletives
In this lesson we learn about expletives, which are essential parts of a sentence that serve as placeholders without adding significant meaning. Clear explanations and practice exercises to help you learn.
What Are Expletives?
Expletives: Uses
Expletives are not completely insignificant or meaningless. They can be used to:
- indicate emphasis
- give a particular tone to the statement
- help build the meter in verse
Common Expletives in English
In English, there are some words and phrases that are commonly used as expletives:
- like
- you know
- so
- in fact
- damn it
- by golly
- oaths or profanities
Let's take a look at some examples:
Well,
I was
They thought they could win and,
Attributive Expletives
Some expletives are attributive adjectives or adverbs that are used to indicate a strong feeling (anger, irritation, approval, excitement, etc.). These words do not add any meaning to the sentence nor are they necessary in the sentence. They are mostly profanities or swear words. For example:
You'd better pay for your
The expletive 'bloody' is usually used among British speakers.
Where is my
This festival is
Do as an Expletive
"Do" as an Expletive
The verb 'do'is sometimes used as an expletive before verbs to show emphasis. In this case, 'do' does not have any meaning, it is simply there as a filler. For example:
You
Negative Expletive
A negative expletive is a sentence construction that includes one or more negative words that are redundant or unnecessary. One example is the double negative construction in English, which was more commonly used in old English but can still be found in modern English in some contexts. For example:
Nobody
I ain't
Syntactic Expletive
A syntactic expletive is a pronoun that is used at the beginning of a sentence without adding any semantic meaning. These pronouns are also known as dummy subjects or pronouns. The primary purpose of these expletives is to provide a subject for the sentence and to indicate the existence of something. Common syntactic expletives of English are:
- It is
- There is/are
- Here is/are
"There" as an individual word doesn't carry any meaning here, it just points to existence of something. It just has a grammatical purpose.
"It" does not refer to anything, it can't be replaced with a noun unlike regular pronouns.
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