Dummy Subjects

This bit from her blog enticed me to do some more research. So I’m going to investigate dummy subjects for my next several posts. As always, I’ll be exploring how the idea of Dummy Subjects can aid us in Capturing Voices.

Common terms used in teaching the expletive use of it and there are “dummy it, ” “dummy there,” and “dummy subject.”

expletive: Of a word or phrase: serving merely to fill out a sentence or a metrical line without adding anything to the sense.

Dummy
A derivative of dumb (“unable to speak), dummy boasts twenty-one shades of meaning in its OED entry. There’s even a verb, to dummy up: “to render silent.”

Merriam-Webster arranges its definitions of dummy under five headings, one of which is “an imitation, copy, or likeness of something used as a substitute.” This is the word’s meaning in the general terms “newspaper dummy,” “ventriloquist’s dummy,” crash-test dummy,” and “dummy corporation.” All stand in for or act as a substitute for something else. The usage is clear.

When it comes to the grammatical terms—“dummy it,” “dummy there,” and “dummy subject”—connotation enters the picture.

Words exert power.

Some words exert so much power that they must not be spoken or written.

For the orthodox Jew, the word God is so fraught with divine power that it is written as G-d. In speech, a different word altogether—Hashem (“Name”)—is used.

An English word that centuries of contemptuous use have imbued with toxic power is now referred to as “the n-word.”

A word that seems innocuous or even pleasant to one speaker may stir feelings of discomfort in another. For example, an insect name that had always sounded romantic to me—the “gypsy moth”—has been officially changed by the Entomological Society of America. The change was prompted by the fact that—for Romani people—the word gypsy has distressing connotations.

In Anglo-Saxon times, our linguistic ancestors used the adjective dumb only to mean “speechless” or “unable to speak.” The word dummy was coined to refer to people so afflicted. It didn’t take long for the noun to acquire the meaning, “stupid person.”

It can be argued that the dummy in “dummy subject” is so totally removed from use of dummy as an accusation of stupidity as to be irrelevant. But, although words can be conveniently categorized in a dictionary, connotations often overlap in use.

Take the British word for a baby’s pacifier, for example. In the UK, crying babies are given a “dummy.” In this context, the word dummy is a substitute nipple, but it is also a means of obtaining silence from the baby.

The word dummy used to label a grammatical construction implies that there is something wrong, if not stupid, about the usage. Here are some sentences that might be said to contain a “dummy subject.”

There’s a unicorn in the garden.
There will be a time to sleep, but not now.
It’s raining, it’s pouring, the old man is snoring.
It’s too late to apologize.

So what exactly is a dummy subject? And how does it figure in writing and speech? The Editor’s Manual explains:

What is a dummy subject?

EXAMPLES

• Maya wants to travel the world.
• We don’t know where Poco is.
• The book you were looking for is on the bookshelf.

A sentence must have a subject. When one isn’t available, the pronouns it and there fill this position.

EXAMPLES

• It is raining today. Not “is raining today.”
• There is no way Farley can win this match. Not “Is no way Farley can win this match.”

Note how dummy subjects don’t refer to anything specific. Compare this with it being used as a pronoun in place of a specific noun.

EXAMPLE

• Look at this wooden table. It is three hundred years old. In this sentence, it refers to something specific: a wooden table. Therefore, the word isn’t being used as a dummy subject.

TIP

The dummy subject is variously called a fake, artificial, or empty subject.