Expletives
Expletives or placeholders are words or phrases that are used to fill out a sentence without adding essential meaning to the sense of the whole sentence.
What Are Expletives?
Why Do We Use Expletives?
Expletives are not completely insignificant or meaningless. We can use them:
- to indicate emphasis
- to give a particular tone to the statement
- to help build the meter in verse
- to indicate tense
Common Expletives in English
In English, there are some words and phrases that are used as expletives:
- like
- you know
- so
- damn it
- gosh golly
- by golly
- oaths or profanities
Let's take a look at some examples:
Well,
I was
They thought they could win and,
Attributive Expletives
These 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
Look at my
Do as an Expletive
In time, the verb 'do' began to be 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:
Do as an Expletive
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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Predicates
The part of a sentence that contains the verb and gives information about the subject is called the predicate. In this lesson, we will discuss it.
Antecedents
Antecedents are nouns or noun phrases that refer to the pronoun. If you are eager to learn them or know more about them, read this.
Appositives
Appositives help us understand the text better. You may ask why? Appositives give more information about a particular noun.
Parts of Speech
A part of speech is any grammatical group, such as noun, verb, and adjective, into which words are classified based on their use.
