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Pleonasm can serve as a redundancy check; if a word is unknown, misunderstood, misheard, or if the medium of communication is poor—a static-filled radio transmission or sloppy handwriting—pleonastic phrases can help ensure that the meaning is communicated even if some of the words are lost.
An inserted subject is referred to as a pleonastic, or expletive it (also called a dummy pronoun). Because it is semantically meaningless, pleonastic it is not considered a true argument, meaning that a verb with this it as the subject is truly avalent.
Expletive, pleonastic, or dummy subjects have been crucial to syntactic argumentation. Their lack of semantic content, and their staunch grammatical aspect provide a method to explore differences between syntax and semantics. [26] [27]
The further one gets from understanding of the original meaning and usage of the name or loan word/phrase, the more likely the construction is to become pleonastic. That doesn't make it truly redundant in an actual usage sense, but can lead to quite a lot of underlying tautology, as in Torpenhow Hill.
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. [1] As such, it is an example of exophora. Dummy pronouns are used in many Germanic languages, including German and English.
Huddleston and Pullum (Cambridge Grammar of the English Language 2002): Dummy, with expletive and pleonastic only used for other, pronoun-irrelevant senses. This suggests to me that either dummy or expletive would be OK, but gives me no reason to think that pleonastic is a standard term. So how about pleonastic?
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Pleonastic pro-forms also lack a linguistic antecedent, e.g. It is raining , where the pronoun it is semantically empty and cannot be viewed as referring to anything specific in the discourse world. Definite pro-forms such as they and you also have an indefinite use, which means they denote some person or people in general, e.g.