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The word expletive is currently used in three senses: syntactic expletives, expletive attributives, and "bad language".
The word expletive comes from the Latin verb explere, meaning "to fill", via expletivus, "filling out". It was introduced into English in the seventeenth century to refer to various kinds of padding -- the padding out of a book with peripheral material, the addition of syllables to a line of poetry for metrical purposes, and so forth. Such uses of expletive are now rare. Rather, expletive is a term in linguistics for a meaningless word filling a syntactic vacancy, while the word is more generally used to refer to "bad language" -- although a distinction is sometimes drawn by linguists between truly meaningless use of "bad language" on the one hand and meaningful use on the other.
Syntactic expletives
Syntactic expletives are words that perform a syntactic role but contribute nothing to meaning. Expletive subjects are part of the grammar of languages such as English (languages that are not "pro-drop") 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.)
It is worth noting that Bishop Lowth did not condemn sentences that use there as an expletive, even though it is one in for example:
- "There are ten desks here."
The nomenclature used for the constituents of sentences such as this is still a matter of some dispute, but there might be called subject, are copula, and ten desks predicate nominal. Meanwhile here is an adverbial phrase that conveniently reveals the semantic vacuity of there in this example.
There is some disagreement over whether the it in such sentences as
- "It is raining now."
are expletives. Whereas it makes no sense to ask what the it refers to in "It is important that you work hard for the exam", some people might say that the it in "It is raining now" refers to the weather (even if the word weather has not previously been mentioned). Thus the it in such sentences is sometimes called expletive, sometimes a weather "it".
Expletive attributives
In sentences such as the following:
- "You'd better pray for a bloody miracle if you want to avoid bankruptcy."
- "That was a bloody good meal."
- "The bloody policeman tailed me all the way home."
- "I hope he bloody chokes on his pretzels."
bloody contributes nothing to the meaning. Rather, it suggests the anger, irritation, admiration, etc. of the speaker. In having no meaning, it resembles the syntactic expletives discussed above; in these uses, bloody is an expletive.
Common expletive attributives include damned, fucking (more offensive), and motherfucking (highly offensive). Note that not all uses of such words are of this kind: "The concert was fucking brilliant" contains an expletive attributive, but "They filmed themselves fucking" does not as the offensive word is used meaningfully. (However, see below on "bad language".)
Other words that are never thought of as offensive can be used in similar ways. For example:
- "I forgot to pay the phone bill twice running, so the wretched line was cut off."
The phone line discussed may (before it was cut off) have been just as good as any other, and therefore would not have been wretched in the dictionary senses of "extremely shoddy", "devoid of hope" or similar. Rather, wretched serves here as a politer equivalent of expletive bloody and the like. However, such meaningless uses of inoffensive words are seldom referred to as "expletive".
"Bad language"
The term expletive is used outside linguistics to refer to any "bad language", used with or without meaning. In the Watergate tape transcripts and elsewhere, the phrase expletive deleted replaces an obscene or otherwise offensive term that might offend the reader (or particularly embarrass the speaker). Expletives in this sense are adjectives, adverbs, nouns or, most commonly, interjections, or (rarely) verbs.
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