In his Analysing Sentences, Noel Burton-Roberts argues that in

"It disconcerted her that the king was in his counting house."

the expletive "it," though empty of meaning, is the grammatical subject
of the sentence and the 'that' clause an "extraposed subject
construction."

This would seem to differ from the view of Diana Hacker, whose
best-selling handbook I am using for my Preface to Rhetoric class this
spring. In the book, she tells students that the common expletives 'it'
and 'there' "merely serve to get the sentence going" and in her examples
marks an NP of some kind after the verb as the sentence's subject (I
take it that she would see Burton-Roberts's "extraposed subject" above
as the real subject of its sentence, i.e., "That the king was in his
counting house disconcerted her." (?)

Could someone please shed light on this? Is there disagreement in the
linguistic community on how expletives should be treated? This seems
more to me than an esoteric question, given that expletives are used
with such high frequency.

(note: Though in some very common sentences, I don't see how Hacker
would explain the expletive as anything but a subject: "It is raining,"
for example.)

thanks,

Kent

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