Non-referential elements in the history of Low German

Abstract The paper investigates the development of the system of non-referential elements in Low German from a cross-Germanic perspective. The data is taken from the currently available reference corpora, which cover the period from the beginning of the attestation in the late 9th century to 1700. The analysis of the corpus data suggests that the equivalents of the neuter pronouns it and that act as cataphoric elements already in the earliest Low German records, and that they gradually acquire additional non-referential functions, including that of an existential expletive. This contrasts with the assumed situation in the contemporary Low German varieties which, according to traditional descriptions, lack pronominal expletives comparable to German es but rather display adverbial expletives, comparable to existential there in English and er in Dutch. Examining the distributional properties of the pronominal expletive it in the history of Low German, the paper observes that this type of expletive is prototypically present in formal written registers and likely remains outside the domain of spoken, colloquial style, which is the focus of the traditional dialectal descriptions.