Expletives in broad focus VS constructions of old Venetan

In a corpus of early Venetan texts from the 14th-15th centuries, we note the optional presence of a non-referential pronominal form in broad focus VS constructions. We claim that the emergence of this kind of expletive spells out anaphoric agreement with the implicit, context-dependent (spatio-temporal) topic that sentence-focus structures presuppose. The data under scrutiny testify to the earliest stage of the emergence of a preverbal expletive form in presentational constructions, thus offering diachronic evidence in support of the view that thetic propositions are predications of an implicit stage topic, which is understood in the context of the discourse. In the diamesic dimension of the written domain of the early texts this topic recurrently surfaces in the form of spatio-temporal adverbials, which express the logodeictic coordinates in which all-new information sentences are embedded in narratives. However, we note that in the absence of such coordinates the expletives occurs.