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.)
There is a ghost in the room
expl(is, There)
It is clear that we should decline .
expl(clear, It)
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.
ROOT há um processo de conglomerização de empresas
root(ROOT, há)
dobj(há, processo)
Caso não haja fila , o período de uso pode ser maior .
mark(haja, caso)
obj(haja, fila)
advmod(haja, não)
advcl(maior, haja)
nsubj(maior, período)
expl in other languages: [bg] [de] [el] [en] [fr] [fro] [gsw] [it] [no] [pt] [qpm] [ro] [ru] [sl] [sv] [u] [yue]