grammar - Grammatically, what is "It" in the following sentence?


I'm currently working at a private academy in Korea, and my boss just asked me a real head-scratcher.


In the sentence:



It doesn't have to be hot and humid for players to lose too much water from their bodies.



I'm aware that "It" is a subject pronoun replacing "The weather." Besides that, however, I'm unsure.


Is it a false subject? I wouldn't think so since it's a pronoun. Is it some crazy kind of indirect object?


Anyway, thank you all for your help!



Answer



Yes, it is a subject, specifically a dummy subject, realized through the use of a dummy pronoun. Talking about the weather is the classic example for dummy subjects in English.


From Wikipedia:



A dummy pronoun, also called an expletive pronoun or pleonastic pronoun, is a pronoun used for syntax without adding further meaning. An example is the "it" in "it is raining".



And more specifically:



Weather it


In the phrase It is raining, the verb to rain is usually considered semantically impersonal, even though it appears as syntactically intransitive; in this view, the required it is to be considered a dummy word.



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