Expletive dropping in Faroese: Two competing ways of expressing the world

Abstract

In some languages with expletive subjects, these subjects are either optionally or mandatorily left out of the sentence if they cannot occur in its initial position, a phenomenon which will here be referred to as expletive dropping. Expletive dropping in Faroese is traditionally described as optional, but the author’s fieldwork disclosed a number of conditions which either favour or disfavour expletive dropping. In this paper these fieldwork data, and the research results extracted from them, are outlined in detail, in light and support of the author’s theory that expletive subjects are referential items which refer to “the world”, i.e. the stage of the event.