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In the course of their history, English wh-relatives are known to have undergone a syntactic change in their prepositional usage: having originally occurred only with piedpiped prepositions, they came to admit preposition stranding as an alternative pattern. The present article presents an overview of this process, showing a modest beginning of stranding in Late Middle English, an increase in Early Modern English, and then a clear decrease in the written language of today, against a more liberal use in spoken English, standard as well as nonstandard. The drop in the incidence of stranding is thus not an expression of a genuine grammatical change but due to notions of correctness derived from the grammar of Latin and affecting written usage. The general trend of the development outlined is mirrored by relative that, with which the pied piping attested in Middle English completely disappeared from the language.

IntroductionIt is commonly assumed by grammarians of English that among the personal pronouns the word it has two types of usage, one which is parallel to the other pronouns of the class, and the other one of a kind which is distinct from anything found with the other personal pronouns. 1 As these facts are represented by grammarians, the special uses of it are generally listed as comprising three distinct cases which appear to be the same in all grammars in use today, and thus create the impression that there is a complete agreement between the different grammarians on this point. It seems, however, that while the grammarians are agreed on the kind of cases in which the special it is said to be used, their agreement does not necessarily include anything more. If we go beyond the mere statement of the type of sentences in which this it is found and inquire into the semantic and syntactic nature of the word, the impression of agreement is replaced by a picture which offers a variety of different views. To be sure, there has recently been a tendency among modern grammarians towards greater agreement on the nature of the special it, but differences of opinion are certainly still there even on fundamental questions of analysis. A telling example of this is a recent controversy: the analysis of the so-called anticipatory it proposed in Seppänen, Engström and Seppänen (1990), and the treatment of the same data by Kaltenböck (1998Kaltenböck ( , 1999 which sees the Seppänen et al view as fundamentally misguided and rejects it on all essential points of the analysis. As regards the raw data examined, there is no disagreement here, but the two descriptions offered of those data come to conclusions which are diametrically opposed. As both sides in this exchange refer to earlier analyses which support their own views, it is clear that the controversy reflects a situation where there are genuine differences between different grammarians in the interpretation of the relevant linguistic structures.It is clear then that in spite of appearances, the proper analysis of the special uses of it involves open questions and is clearly in need of further study. Returning to examine this part of the grammar, I propose to concentrate on the two uses of it discussed in the Seppänen vs. Kaltenböck exchange, leaving out cleft sentences, which were not involved in the controversy. I will begin by briefly indicating the basic facts and the main trends in their treatment by both older and more modern grammarians of English (section 2), and will then examine separately the nature of the so-called weather it (section 3) and the socalled anticipatory it (section 4), finishing with some concluding remarks.

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