Which of these is used correctly?
It were them.
It was them.
It was they.
It were they.
I actually think the "it" is an expletive indicator so noun is whether them or they and since both are plural, the correct one should be 1 or 4. Is that right?
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Sign up to join this communityWhich of these is used correctly?
It were them.
It was them.
It was they.
It were they.
I actually think the "it" is an expletive indicator so noun is whether them or they and since both are plural, the correct one should be 1 or 4. Is that right?
If the subject is the action then It was done by them, as in 2. It was them.
If the subject is the actor then It was they who did it, as in 3. It was they.
If the action took place in a remote part of Yorkshire then either way, it might be acceptable to use It were them.
From my comment on the question itself:
A syntactic expletive by definition contributes nothing to the sentence's meaning. Sentences 1 and 4 of your examples are not valid English because "it" is singular (in these cases, implicitly acting as a pronoun representing an agent responsible for an act). Therefore the word "it" contributes meaning to the sentence. A better example of the syntactic expletive is found in the statement, "It will rain tomorrow." In this example, "it" has no meaning.
Edited for an answer format:
Sentences 1 and 4 of your examples are not valid English because "it" is singular (in these cases, implicitly acting as a pronoun representing an agent responsible for an act).
That said, "syntactic expletive" by definition means the expletive contributes no meaning to the sentence overall. In these cases, the word "it" presumably acts as a pronoun representing an agent responsible for an act, if the context of the example can be inferred to be a response to a question asking who or what did something. For the sentences in question, then, the word "it" contributes necessary meaning and is not an example of syntactic expletive.
In a comment on the question, John Lawler answered:
Except in a very limited context (like as a short answer to a long question), all of those sentences are ungrammatical. Dummy it does not occur by itself. It is always a part of a construction — Extraposition in this case — that involves several constituents of the sentence, and makes no sense outside that construction.