"it" in "I'd appreciate it if you would ..."

Hi, Raymondaliasapollyon.  "IT" in "I'd appreciate it if you would carry this chair to my room" is a regular pronoun, which refers to the idea contained in "if you would carry this chair to my room."   There should not be any problem if the "if-clause" is placed at the beginning of the sentence.

More examples in which "it" refers to a sentence:

He has gone out of his way to help us.  We won't forget it. (quote)

They won the match after a hard struggle.  It wasn't easy though. (quote)

Dick is trying to finish his book this month but he won't find it easy. (quote)

Hi, all,

Once again, I cannot but refer to this great thread where David clarifies how the "if"-clause is to be interpreted.

As to how "it" is to be considered, I'd like to see David's opinion, but, in my view, "it" seems to be dummy if the "if"-clause follows and it is clearly a regular pronoun (its antecedent being the "if"-clause) if the "if"-clause appears in initial position.

Hi Gustavo and f6pafd,

I know regular pronouns can have cataphoric reference, but that seems to require a particular distribution.

1. When he came home, John found his apartment had been burglarized.

Here, the pronoun "he" refers cataphorically to "John," which is in the main clause.

Let us try putting a regular pronoun in the main clause and see if cataphoric reference is possible:

2. He found his apartment had been burglarized when John came home.

Here, the pronoun "he" is intended to refer cataphorically to "John," which is in the subordinate clause.

If (2) is unacceptable, then it may cast doubt on treating the "it" in "I would appreciate it if you would carry this chair to my room" as a regular pronoun.

@raymondaliasapollyon posted:

2. He found his apartment had been burglarized when John came home.

Here, the pronoun "he" is intended to refer cataphorically to "John," which is in the subordinate clause.

If (2) is unacceptable, then it may cast doubt on treating the "it" in "I would appreciate it if you would carry this chair to my room" as a regular pronoun.

Hello, everybody—Ray, I agree with your implicit observation that (2) is ungrammatical with "he" being interpreted as coreferent with "John" and realize that you are illustrating a Chomskyan binding principle, namely, the one about a pronoun's being grammatically unable to c-command its own antecedent.

I think it is worth observing that the referent of "it" is not syntactically present. While I see that, in 2017, I argued with Declerck and Reed that there may be covert "that"-clause that gets deleted in the march toward surface structure, I think that one could also say that the referent is purely semantic.

We know what the referent of "it" is in "I'd appreciate it if you would carry this chair to my room," and we can put the idea in various ways (e.g., "I'd appreciate your carrying this chair to my room if you did so"; "I'd appreciate that you had carried this chair to my room were you to do so"), none of which is present.

It seems to me that the status of the pronoun is somewhere between "dummy" and "regular." Leaving what I may or may not have said in 2017 aside, I don't find the "it" to be a dummy because it doesn't anticipate any phrase that is manifestly syntactically present in the sentence.

I don't find the "it" to be a regular pronoun, either, because it refers to a situation rather than to a person, place, or thing. That is, its referent appears to me to be propositional, whether that proposition is stated with a "that"-clause or some type of nominalization.

Lately, I've been thinking about the "it" in cleft sentences (e.g., "It was Dick whom Jane met at the party"), and have likewise decided that such "it" is somewhere between a dummy and a regular pronoun. In the parenthetical example, "it" could be defined as "the someone whom Jane met at the party."

Some authors have used the term situational "it." How does that term suit you?

It is not unusual that the same thing is classified differently based on different points of view; it is, in fact, a matter of terminology. There are so many terms designated to the word "it," such as the pronoun "it," the personal "it,' the impersonal "it," the anaphoric "it," the demonstrative "it," the expletive "it," the emphatic "It," the indefinite "it," (for example, "We shall have IT out with the rascal!"), the anticipatory "it" and the dummy "it," and even "the cataphoric "it." Why have there been so many different terms coined only for the word "it." That is all due to the different functions "it" performs in the sentence. Only for the convenience of discussion have so many names been given to the word "it." Each bespeaks a special function. It is the function the word "it" performs that is important, not the term. As long as you can parse its correct functions, any controversy over the use of terms is of little importance. What does it matter if we call it the cataphoric "it," the anticipatory "it," the dummy "it," and even simply the pronoun? Amid the controversy, opinions vary. We can agree to differ.

@David, Moderator posted:

Hello, everybody—Ray, I agree with your implicit observation that (2) is ungrammatical with "he" being interpreted as coreferent with "John" and realize that you are illustrating a Chomskyan binding principle, namely, the one about a pronoun's being grammatically unable to c-command its own antecedent.

I think it is worth observing that the referent of "it" is not syntactically present. While I see that, in 2017, I argued with Declerck and Reed that there may be covert "that"-clause that gets deleted in the march toward surface structure, I think that one could also say that the referent is purely semantic.

We know what the referent of "it" is in "I'd appreciate it if you would carry this chair to my room," and we can put the idea in various ways (e.g., "I'd appreciate your carrying this chair to my room if you did so"; "I'd appreciate that you had carried this chair to my room were you to do so"), none of which is present.

It seems to me that the status of the pronoun is somewhere between "dummy" and "regular." Leaving what I may or may not have said in 2017 aside, I don't find the "it" to be a dummy because it doesn't anticipate any phrase that is manifestly syntactically present in the sentence.

I don't find the "it" to be a regular pronoun, either, because it refers to a situation rather than to a person, place, or thing. That is, its referent appears to me to be propositional, whether that proposition is stated with a "that"-clause or some type of nominalization.

Lately, I've been thinking about the "it" in cleft sentences (e.g., "It was Dick whom Jane met at the party"), and have likewise decided that such "it" is somewhere between a dummy and a regular pronoun. In the parenthetical example, "it" could be defined as "the someone whom Jane met at the party."

Some authors have used the term situational "it." How does that term suit you?

Hello David,

We may call it the situational "it." Then it raises the practical issue of whether the situational "it" is okay in examples such as the following:

We have talked about it even though we cannot agree among ourselves on whether we should buy that car.

Do you find it okay?

@raymondaliasapollyon posted:

We may call it the situational "it." Then it raises the practical issue of whether the situational "it" is okay in examples such as the following:

We have talked about it even though we cannot agree among ourselves on whether we should buy that car.

Do you find it okay?

Is that example analogous? The difference I see is that "it" can be replaced with the "whether"-clause in that example ("We have talked about whether we should buy that car"), whereas the "it" in the OP example cannot be replaced with the "if"-clause (*"I'd appreciate if you could carry this chair to my room").

Someone told me that in "We have talked about it even though we cannot agree among ourselves on whether we should buy that car," the "it" just accidentally refers to the whether-clause. Technically, it refers to something said in the previous sentences. The whether-clause is a mere repetition of the topic. Do you agree?