There is more: Variation in expletive constructions in Dutch

This thesis is concerned with expletive clauses in Dutch. An example of such a construction follows in (1). (1) Er loopt iemand op straat. There walks someone on street ‘Someone is walking in the street.’ In this sentence the expletive pronoun er ‘there’ is supposedly in subject position, while the lexical subject iemand ‘someone’ remains lower in the clause (see Wesseling 2018 for a more detailed view of subjecthood and the subject position in Dutch). This begs the question what the syntactic function of er is. We also find expletive er in wh-subject questions, as in (2). (2) Wie komt er? who... Mehr ...