Expletives, Transitive Expletives, and Subject Positions

English speakers learn early that there and a real subject do not mix: you can say "There is a problem" but never "*There has someone eaten the cake." The expletive there shows up only when there is no ordinary subject to take the slot — it is a placeholder for a missing subject, and a transitive verb with its own agent leaves no vacancy to fill. Icelandic breaks this rule wide open. Its expletive það can sit at the front of a perfectly ordinary transitive clause while a full thematic subject sits lower down: Það hefur einhver borðað kökuna — literally "there has someone eaten the cake," meaning "someone has eaten the cake." This is the Transitive Expletive Construction (TEC), and it is essentially unique to Icelandic among the well-studied Germanic languages. It is also the single best piece of evidence that an Icelandic clause contains two distinct subject positions, not one. This page is about that construction, the two positions it reveals, and the indefiniteness restriction that governs it. (For the basic dummy það of weather and existentials, see syntax/dummy-thad and syntax/existential-sentences; here we go past them.)

The puzzle: two subjects in one clause?

Look hard at the canonical example. There is an expletive það in the clause-initial slot. There is also a genuine, agent-bearing, indefinite subject einhver "someone" sitting after the finite verb. And there is a direct object kökuna "the cake." All three are present.

The verb agrees with the low subject, not the expletive: lásu is plural because margir "many" is plural; hefur is singular because einhver "someone" is singular. So einhver / margir is the real grammatical subject (the agreement controller, the agent), and það is a semantically empty placeholder occupying a different slot. That is the crux: there are evidently two positions for a subject-like element — a high one filled by það, and a low one filled by the thematic subject. English has only one, which is why it cannot do this at all.

Why English 'there' can't do it

The reason English bars "*There has someone eaten the cake" is that English there and the thematic subject compete for the same position — the single English subject slot. There is licensed only when that slot would otherwise be empty, i.e. with unaccusative/existential verbs ("There arrived a man," "There is a problem") where the logical subject can stay low and there fills the vacant high slot. A transitive verb's agent needs the subject slot, so there has nowhere to go. Icelandic, having two slots, faces no such competition: það takes the high one, the agent takes the low one, and both are happy. This is not a stylistic nicety — it is a structural difference in how many subject positions the two languages provide.

The definiteness restriction: the low subject must be indefinite

The two-position freedom comes with a hard condition: the low (thematic) subject in an expletive construction must be indefinite. einhver "someone," margir "many," maður "a man," enginn "no one," fáir "few," einhverjir nemendur "some students" — all fine. A definite noun phrase — Jón, kennarinn "the teacher," þessir nemendur "these students" — is barred from the low position. This is the same definiteness restriction (or definiteness effect) familiar from English existentials ("There is a problem" vs "*There is the problem"), but in Icelandic it polices the low subject of the TEC, not just existentials.

If you want a definite subject ("Jón has eaten the cake," "the teacher read this book"), you simply do not use the expletive: the definite subject takes the high position itself, and það is absent.

The expletive drops when something else fronts

The expletive það is a creature of the clause-initial position, and it is there only because Icelandic is a V2 language: the prefield (the slot before the finite verb) must be filled, and if nothing else claims it, the empty það steps in. The moment a contentful element fronts — an adverb, an object, a question word — it claims the prefield, the verb stays in second position, and það vanishes. The low subject stays exactly where it was; only the placeholder disappears, because its one job (filling an otherwise-empty prefield) is now done by something else.

This drop is itself a diagnostic of what það is: a pure prefield-filler. Compare a referential það "it/that," which does not vanish under fronting because it is a real argument carrying meaning. The expletive's disappearance the instant the prefield is otherwise filled shows it has no content of its own — it is grammatical scaffolding, present only to satisfy V2.

Putting the pieces together: the two-position model

The TEC, the agreement facts, the definiteness restriction, and the expletive-drop all fall out of one picture: the clause offers two subject positions, a high one (the prefield/Spec of the highest functional projection) and a low one (the base subject position, Spec-vP, where the agent originates). Ordinary clauses raise the subject from low to high, so you see only one. But an indefinite subject may stay low, and then the high position must be filled some other way — by the expletive það (under V2 with nothing else fronted) or by whatever element fronts instead. Define this once and the otherwise-baffling sentence Það las einhver bókina "someone read the book" is no longer mysterious: það high, indefinite agent einhver low, object bókina lower still, verb agreeing with einhver. Competitor resources never explain such sentences; with the two-position model they are routine.

Why this is hard for English speakers

The trap is a confident false belief: because English there is strictly intransitive/existential, English speakers assume an expletive and a real transitive subject cannot coexist, and so they either (a) reject grammatical Icelandic TECs as errors, or (b) avoid producing them, falling back on awkward workarounds. Both are mistakes. The fix is to internalise that það is not English there — it is a prefield-filler, compatible with a full transitive clause underneath, provided the low subject is indefinite. A second, subtler error is leaving the expletive in when something else has fronted (\Í dag hefur það einhver borðað — það must drop), a calque on the way English *there survives fronting. And a third is trying to put a definite subject in the low slot (\Það hefur Jón…*), which the definiteness restriction forbids.

Common Mistakes

The expletive fills the prefield; it cannot float in after the real subject.

Key Takeaways

• Icelandic's expletive það is a prefield-filler, not the English existential there. It can co-occur with a full transitive clause — the Transitive Expletive Construction: Það hefur einhver borðað kökuna "someone has eaten the cake," Það lásu margir þessa bók "many read this book."
• The TEC is essentially unique to Icelandic among Germanic languages and is the strongest evidence that a clause has two structural subject positions — a high one (filled by það) and a low one (filled by the thematic subject).
• The verb agrees with the low subject (lásu ← margir; hefur ← einhver); the expletive never controls agreement.
• A definiteness restriction governs the low subject: it must be indefinite (einhver, margir, enginn, fáir, maður). A definite subject (Jón, kennarinn) cannot sit low — it takes the high slot directly and the expletive is dropped.
• The expletive drops the instant a contentful element fronts (Í dag hefur einhver…, Þessa bók lásu margir), because its only job is to satisfy V2 by filling an otherwise-empty prefield.
• English speakers wrongly assume an expletive and a real transitive subject cannot coexist; the cure is to treat það as scaffolding compatible with a transitive clause under it, keep the low subject indefinite, and let the expletive vanish under fronting.