Giving content to expletive es in German

Abstract

AbstractThe present paper proposes an alternative analysis of so-called expletive es in German. It is argued that es has semantic content that serves to anchor the utterance in the context. In particular, I argue that es constitutes a weak demonstrative element binding a situation argument. The account gets rid of the assumption that the relevant head in the clause is endowed with an EPP-feature and restores the original principle underlying it, namely the requirement that every predicate needs a contentful subject argument it can be predicated of. The account also explains in more depth the obligatory and optional occurrences of es and proposes that there are essentially two occurrences of es to distinguish in terms of their syntactic properties.