Re: Odd construct

Matt Pearson skrev:

>If you mean the semantically empty "it" found in sentences like "It is
>raining" or "It seems that John is sick", then yes.  Both are referred to
>as expletives.  In fact there are some languages (Swedish, I think) where a
>single element corresponds to both expletive "it" and expletive "there".
Yup. We have "det" for both of those:

Det regnar. - 'It is raining.'
Det verkar som om Johan är sjuk. 'It seems that John is sick.'

"There is" is "Det finns" in Swedish.

Det finns bröd på bordet. "There is bread on the table."

"Det" is used for a bunch of stuff. I had a teacher once who
had done some research on that and he came up with like 17
different uses of "det".

And "det" is pronounced [de:t] in careful speech, but
normally [de(:)] if anyone was wondering. :)

||| daniel


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