The expletive-like pronoun to ‘that’ in Serbo-Croatian as a topic-situation correlative pronoun

Abstract The paper investigates the expletive-like demonstrative to ‘that, it’ in Serbo-Croatian, which optionally appears in complex sentences containing causal clauses introduced by the subordinators kako and pošto ‘since’. It behaves like an expletive in that it does not affect the (truth-conditional) meaning of the complex sentence in any obvious way. We consider its co-occurrence with two additional optional pronominal items, onda ‘then’ and za-to ‘because,’ a complex item comprising a causal preposition and another to ‘that, it’. We argue that all three items are actually topic-situation pronouns, thus contributing to the growing body of recent literature arguing that expletive(-like) elements are discourse-related items rather than merely structural fillers.