Definition of expletive in English:
- She let out a long string of oaths and expletives, carefully picking herself up from the floor.
- Instead of a lesson in experimental theatre, they were bombarded with graphic scenes of violence and a non-stop stream of expletives.
- The game remained heated, with the sent-off players voicing their unhappiness on the sidelines and adding to a stream of expletives.
- I think people don't use ‘it’ for exactly that reason Todd - it's so often an expletive or a dummy pronoun that it would get confusing.
- Finally, both the antecedent of PRO and PRO itself have to be an argument and cannot be an expletive.
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- Icelandic takes the non-referential property of quasi-argumental null subjects as basic, therefore quasi-argumental null subjects in the language can be interpreted as basically expletive.
- ‘There’ is used as the subject of an existential sentence in standard English while it is used in most other situations in which a ‘dummy’ or expletive subject is necessary.
- A-positions are not necessarily assigned a theta role: The subject position may be occupied by an expletive element.
Late Middle English (as an adjective): from late Latin expletivus, from explere 'fill out', from ex- 'out' + plere 'fill'. The noun sense 'word used merely to fill out a sentence' (early 17th century) was applied specifically to a swear word in the early 19th century.
This word is from late Latin expletivus, from explere ‘fill out’, from ex- ‘out’ and plere ‘to fill’. The general sense ‘word used merely to fill out a sentence’ (early 17th century) was applied specifically to an oath or swear word in the early 19th century. The phrase expletive deleted gained a high profile in the 1970s in the submission of recorded conversations involving President Nixon to the Committee on the Judiciary of the House of Representatives ( 30 April 1974).
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