expl
: expletive
There is no expl
in Portuguese.
This relation captures expletive or pleonastic nominals. These are nominals that appear in an argument position of a predicate but which do not themselves satisfy any of the semantic roles of the predicate. The main predicate of the clause (the verb or predicate adjective or noun) is the governor. In English, this is the case for some uses of it and there: the existential there, and it when used in extraposition constructions. (Note that both it and there also have non-expletive uses.)
Some languages, as Portuguese, do not have expletives of the English sort, including most languages with free pro-drop (the ability to use zero anaphora rather than overt pronouns). In languages with expletives of this sort, they can be positioned where normally a core argument appears: the subject and direct object (and even indirect object) slots, as in the examples below.
Treebank Statistics (UD_Portuguese-BR)
This relation is universal.
672 nodes (0%) are attached to their parents as expl
.
467 instances of expl
(69%) are right-to-left (child precedes parent).
Average distance between parent and child is 1.45833333333333.
The following 11 pairs of parts of speech are connected with expl
: VERB-PART (351; 52% instances), VERB-PRON (246; 37% instances), NOUN-PART (32; 5% instances), NOUN-PRON (22; 3% instances), PROPN-PART (10; 1% instances), PROPN-PROPN (3; 0% instances), AUX-PART (2; 0% instances), PRON-PART (2; 0% instances), PRON-PRON (2; 0% instances), NOUN-NOUN (1; 0% instances), PART-PART (1; 0% instances).
expl in other languages: [bg] [cs] [de] [el] [en] [es] [eu] [fa] [fi] [fr] [ga] [he] [hu] [it] [ja] [ko] [sv] [u]