Expletive Morphemes in Distributed Morphology

This article proposes insertion of an expletive morpheme as an additional device of PF in the framework of Distributed Morphology. By definition, expletives lack syntactic and semantic features but are still comprised of phonological material. As they are identified as meaningful elements in PF, they have to be formally recognized, and insertion of them has to be implemented in the framework of Distributed Morphology. This paper surveys several expletive morphemes in English (and in German) and their behavior. Examples include the dummy auxiliary do of do support, the dummy verb got of have got and the existential subject there in English and the impersonal subject pronoun es ‘it’ in German. Insertion of these expletive morphemes into the given morphosyntactic or prosodic structure is formalized in the framework of Distributed Morphology.