It is one of the fundamentals of writing that every word must count. Consider these two sentences: the bank president hired three new people whose job was to guard the guards, and the bank president hired three new people whose job it was to guard the guards. The only difference between the two is the addition of the pronoun it in the second version. Does that violate this principle of good writing?
We should say first that both these sentences are grammatically correct, and so the choice between them is rhetorical. Nonetheless, the sentence structure and the grammar that builds it are essential to understand. Both sentences are complex, meaning they include an independent and a subordinate clause. The independent clause appears first in each (the bank president hired three new people), and so their design is called loose. (By contrast, the design of sentences that begin with the subordinate clause, which would not have been possible in this sentence, is called periodic.) The independent clause should cause little confusion: a simple subject (bank president) joined to a transitive verb (hired), followed directly by the direct object (three new people). A standard SVO (subject + verb + object) arrangement.
The subordinate clause, though, poses a degree or two of difficulty, not because either version is unusual, but because both involve a copulative verb—always a mind twister. A copula (the term derives from the Latin noun for a link or rope) identifies the subject of a clause with a noun or adjective in the predicate. Though two conceptual entities are named, as, for example, I and president in a sentence such as I am the president, the copula is asserting not action, but a logical identification of the two named entities. In language, at least, the human mind has no objection to seeing that two are one (what the philosophers discuss under the title nonduality, a similarly mind-confounding idea).
In the first version, the subject of the subordinate clause, job, is being identified with the predicate noun phrase to guard the guards. That phrase begins with the infinitive to guard, and includes the direct object of that infinitive, the guards. Infinitives may function as nouns (and elsewhere as adjectives and adverbs as well), and so we judge this first version of the subordinate clause more direct because the order of subject + copula + predicate noun is not interrupted in any way. Its structure is as straightforward as the simple example of a copula we looked at: I am the president. This word order is abbreviated SVC, where C stands for a complement, here the predicate noun president, which completes (hence, the term complement) the predication the copula is making.
Now that structure is largely the same in the second version of the subordinate clause, but here the pronoun it has been added. This use of the pronoun is called the anticipatory it, and, the odd nomenclature aside, its use is not unusual. Such statements as it’s interesting that you say he was once very poor, or it will not be easy to find another job illustrate the construction. The former means, logically, that you say he was once very poor is interesting, and the latter, to find another job will not be easy. Notice that both these logically more accurate statements also sound more formal. The anticipatory it construction, on the other hand, is used to soften the blow of saying what’s what by introducing a more discursive, conversational presentation of the ideas. This results in the displacement of the logical subject, thereby also giving it more emphasis when it finally appears where it wasn’t expected. As the Dictionary of Contemporary American Usage (Evans and Evans, 1957) puts it: “This is not a “weak” construction. It is a device for making the true subject more emphatic by allowing it to be taken out of its normal position.” The term true subject here means the logical subject.
That is an important observation, and it will affect the way we parse the subordinate clause of the second version. In the examples above, we can see that the “normal position” of the subjects has been reversed in arrangement: the logical, or “true” subjects (that you say he was once very poor and to find another job) appear in the predicate position when the anticipatory it construction is used. In the subordinate clause of the second version of our original example, however, the pronoun it does not reverse the position of the subject, but interrupts it. To assert whose job it was to guard the guards has the rhetorical effect of delaying the logical subject (to guard the guards) by giving the reader a pronoun still in need of—anticipating—an antecedent. Thus, the sentence is set up to keep the reader reading, and the answer to the suspense created finally arrives at the end of the clause. The pronoun then does not have its usual antecedent, but a postcedent. The first sentence of this essay is another example of the construction.
Which version to choose? That all depends on context, as is very often (if not, indeed, always) the case when we are writing as carefully as we can. The choice here is between being declarative or suspensive, black-and-white or more colorful, right-angled or curving. There is no rule to decide such things, for they lie in the order of discernment, not precept. And discernment we get only by reading and reflecting, and living.
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