Dave's ESL Cafe's Student Discussion Forums

[syoshioka99]

The new discoveries that mathematicians are making are very varied in type, so varied indeed that it has been proposed (in despair) to define mathematics as �what mathematicians do�: for mathematicians today attack many problems not regarded as mathematical in the past, and what they will do in the future there is no saying.

(question)

What does 'it' refer to?

My guess is...
1) It=to define mathematics as �what mathematicians do�
or
2) It=something else (which I do not know)

Satoru

Japan

[flying_pig319]

Yes, your #1 was correct

[syoshioka99]

Thank you very much!


Satoru

[Anuradha Chepur]

No, Your #1 is incorrect. 'it' is a dummy subject, a syntactic expletive.

I have copied and pasted the definition for you here:

Syntactic expletives are words that perform a syntactic role but contribute nothing to meaning. Expletive subjects are part of the grammar of many non-pro-drop languages such as English, whose clauses normally require overt provision of subject even when the subject can be pragmatically inferred. Consider this example:

"It is important that you work hard for the exam."

Following the eighteenth-century conception of pronoun, Bishop Robert Lowth objected that since it is a pronoun, it should have an antecedent. Since it cannot function like that in Latin, Lowth said that the usage was incorrect in English.

Whether or not it is a pronoun here (and linguists today would say that it is one), English is not Latin; and the sentence was and is fully acceptable to native speakers of English and thus was and is grammatical. It has no meaning here; it merely serves as a dummy subject. (It is sometimes called preparatory it or prep it, or a dummy pronoun.)