The vagaries of subject it: can it serve as a style marker?

Abstract

This article analyses the distribution of the different functions of the subject it in two text types: academic prose and fiction. Its objective is to discover to what extent and in which aspects the two examined text types differ. The analysis is based on two hundred examples of it in the subject function obtained from the British National Corpus (BNC), one half of them drawn from academic prose, the other from fiction. The functions of it analysed include anaphoric it, anticipatory it, empty it and it as the subject in a cleft sentence (focusing it). Additionally, the instances of it that did not fit into any of the four main categories are also examined.