Word.ws English Dictionary

syntactic expletives

syntactic expletives is the plural of syntactic expletive.

Meaning of syntactic expletive

Noun

syntactic expletive (plural syntactic expletives)

  1. A pronoun that is used at the start of a sentence or clause when the referent is not immediately known, but an argument for the verb is syntactically required.
    • In the sentences "It is a hammer that is needed." and "There are hammers in the toolbox.", both "it" and "there" are syntactic expletives.

Questions about syntactic expletives

What is syntactic expletives the plural of?
Syntactic expletives is the plural of syntactic expletive.

Words near syntactic expletives in the dictionary

  1. synsystematic
  2. SYNT
  3. syntaces
  4. syntactic
  5. syntactic expletive
  6. syntactic expletives
  7. syntactic middle voice
  8. syntactic salt
  9. syntactic sugar
  10. syntactical
  11. syntacticality

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: syntactic expletives (page history and authors); syntactic expletive (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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