Dummy pronoun

A dummy pronoun, also known as an expletive pronoun, is a deictic pronoun that fulfills a syntactical requirement without providing a contextually explicit meaning of its referent. As such, it is an example of exophora.

A dummy pronoun is used when a particular verb argument (or preposition) is nonexistent, but when a reference to the argument (a pronoun) is nevertheless syntactically required. This is commonly the case if the verb is an impersonal verb, but it could also be that the argument is unknown, irrelevant, already understood, or otherwise taboo (as in naming taboo). For example, in the phrase "It is obvious that the violence will continue", the term 'it' is a dummy pronoun, not referring to any agent. Unlike a regular pronoun of English, it cannot be replaced by any noun phrase.

The term 'dummy pronoun' refers to the function of a word in a particular sentence, not a property of individual words. For example, 'it' in the example from the previous paragraph is a dummy pronoun, but 'it' in the sentence "I bought a sandwich and ate it" is a referential pronoun (referring to the sandwich).

Dummy pronouns are used in many languages across language families. Some of these families include Germanic languages, such as German and English, Celtic languages, such as Welsh and Irish, and Volta-Niger languages, such as Ewe and Esan. Other common languages with dummy pronouns include French and, colloquially, in Thai. Pronoun-dropping languages such as Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, and Turkish do not require dummy pronouns.