고대영어 부정사 외치와 허사

The Extraposition of Infinitive and the Expletive Pronoun in Old English

The purpose of this paper is to examine the use of the expletive hit 'it' in Old English when the infinitival clause is extraposed The paper attempts to answer the enduring questions whether the use of the expletive is correlated with types of predicates of the matrix clause, with certain authors, and with types of literature containing the examples This paper is different from previous studies in that it divides Old English data into four subperiods in order to reveal more detailed results The Important findings derived from this study are as follows. first, hit was first introduced when the matrix predicate has VC structure, second, hit was only used in prose, thud, hit was first used in King Alfred's writings, which suggests a correlation with Alfred's writing style. These findings are contrasted with Wahl?n (1925) who concludes that the state of affairs regarding this topic is next to chaotic and thus there are no fixed rules for the addition of the expletive