Charles C. Boycott was an English land agent whose difficult duty it was to collect high taxes from Irish farmers.
I can't understand how it works in this sentence. Does it antecedently refer to "whose difficult duty."
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Sign up to join this communityCharles C. Boycott was an English land agent whose difficult duty it was to collect high taxes from Irish farmers.
If we break the sentence down into two separate clauses, we get:
"Charles C. Boycott was an English land agent. It was his difficult duty to collect high taxes from Irish farmers".
The second clause contains 'extraposition' of the infinitival clause. Compare:
Basic: "To collect high taxes from Irish farmers was his difficult duty".
Extraposed: It was his difficult duty to collect high taxes from Irish farmers.
In the basic version, the subject is filled by the subordinate infinitival clause. In the version with extraposition, the subject position is filled by the dummy pronoun "it" and the subordinate clause appears at the end of the matrix clause in extraposed subject position.
The extraposed element, i.e. the infinitival clause, doesn’t give the meaning (reference) of "it" but serves simply as a semantic argument of the verb phrase.