The Universe of Discourse


Wed, 07 Jul 2021

Examples of dummy pronouns

Katara is interested in linguistics. When school was over for the year and she had time to think about things, I gave her all my old linguistics books. The other day for some reason I mentioned to her that I had known people who were engaged in formal research on the problem of how to get a computer to know what a pronoun referred to, and that this is very difficult.

(I once had a co-worker who claimed that it was simple: the pronoun always refers back to the nearest noun. It wasn't hard to go back in his Slack history and find a counterexample he had uttered a few minutes before.)

Today I wanted to tell Katara about dummy pronouns, which refer to nothing at all. I intended to send her the example from Wiktionary:

it is good to know that you are okay

I started my message:

Here's an interesting example of how hard it can be to find what a pronoun refers to

Then I realized I no longer needed the example.


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