# syntactic expletive

> word that contributes nothing to the semantic meaning of a sentence but performs a syntactic role (e.g. "it" in "it is raining")

**Wikidata**: [Q188274](https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q188274)  
**Wikipedia**: [English](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syntactic_expletive)  
**Source**: https://4ort.xyz/entity/syntactic-expletive


## References

1. Freebase Data Dumps. 2013