dummy subject
empty subject
artificial subject

The dummy subject can undergo inversion, Is there a test today?

It has no meaning here; it merely serves as a dummy subject.

They typically take the adverb er as a dummy subject and are hard to translate directly into English.

The word it can also be used as a dummy subject, in sentences like It is going to be sunny this afternoon.

Impersonal verbs have no true subject, but use a dummy subject pronoun het ("it").

The word there is used as a pronoun in some sentences, playing the role of a dummy subject, normally of an intransitive verb.

Today we examine the use of there as a "dummy subject," with no derogation intended of the gentlemen whose usages I cited.

They usually don't have expletives or "dummy subjects" (pleonastic pronouns) like English it in It's raining.

Why do so many people use there is or there's, construing their dummy subject as singular when the true subject that follows the linking verb is plural?

But in "Julius Caesar," his dummy subject took a singular verb that matched the true subject's number: "There is a tide in the affairs of men."

In the sentence It rains, the pronoun it is a dummy subject; it is merely a syntactic placeholder - it has no concrete referent.

(For an alternative theory considering expletives like there as a dummy predicate rather than a dummy subject based on the analysis of the copula see Moro 1997).

The verb fue has no dummy subject, and the pronoun el que is not a cleaver but a nominalising relative pronoun meaning "the [male] one that".

The dummy subject takes the number (singular or plural) of the logical subject (complement), hence it takes a plural verb if the complement is plural.

Although in English these verbs do have what seems to be a subject, it, it is arguably completely devoid of semantic meaning and merely a syntactic placeholder, a dummy subject.

It's gentle; nice for a change of pace, but too many uses of dummy subjects like "there are, one finds, we have" take the writer down the primrose path of dull dalliance.

(Though it is technically the subject of the verb in English, it is only a dummy subject, that is a syntactic placeholder - it has no concrete referent.

For one thing, both are existential sentences beginning with the dummy subject "there" ; for another, both contain virtually identical sentence-final prepositional phrases ( "in the courtyard", "of the courtyard" ).

Dummy subjects are also used in constructions where there is no grammatical subject such as with impersonal verbs (e.g., it is raining) or in existential clauses (there are many cars on the street).

Certain languages such as Italian and Spanish may have sentences with no overt subject, while other languages such as English must have an overt subject, even in cases in which this is nonreferential (dummy subject).

Moreover, they had no problems in explaining away any unusual cataphoric references as the "it" in the sentence is simply a dummy subject, an item which has no reference value and is purely a formal requirement of the grammar of English.

Other languages with constructions similar to the English dummy subject include French (see il y a) and German (which uses es ist, es sind or es gibt, literally "it is", "it are", "it gives").

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.

Another way is through a cleft sentence where the main clause is demoted to be a complement clause of a copula sentence with a dummy subject such as it or there, e.g. it was the girl that the bee stung, there was a girl who was stung by a bee.