Expletive raising and expletive replacement in Dutch

Recently, two competing analyses of expletives of the there type have been put fo rward. Chomsky (1986a, 1989) argues that these expletives are meaningless elements that are freely inserted at S-str ucture and have to be replaced at LF by the NP the expletive is associated with (the associate ). Moro (1990) argues that these expletives are small clause predicates, to be raised at Sstructure, as in ordinary copular constructions and constructions of Locative Inversion as analyzed in Hoekstra & Mulder (1990). In this paper I will argue that the Dutch expletive er has exactly the properties one would expect it to have under either analysis. Hence, I conclude that there are two types of expletive constructions, expletive replacement and expletive raising, and that whereas Dutch has both types of expletive constructions, English has only expletive raising.