Dummy Predicates
It has been proposed that elements like expletive there in existential sentences and pro in inverse copular sentences play the role of dummy predicate rather than dummy subject so that the postverbal Noun Phrase would rather be the embedded subject of the sentence. See copula and sentence.
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Famous quotes containing the words dummy and/or predicates:
“Fathers and Sons is not only the best of Turgenev’s novels, it is one of the most brilliant novels of the nineteenth century. Turgenev managed to do what he intended to do, to create a male character, a young Russian, who would affirm his—that character’s—absence of introspection and at the same time would not be a journalist’s dummy of the socialistic type.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
“In the case of our main stock of well-worn predicates, I submit that the judgment of projectibility has derived from the habitual projection, rather than the habitual projection from the judgment of projectibility. The reason why only the right predicates happen so luckily to have become well entrenched is just that the well entrenched predicates have thereby become the right ones.”
—Nelson Goodman (b. 1906)