Why if someone is knocking at a door, do we say:
Who is knocking at the door?
And the answer comes:
- It is me/him/her. Instead of saying: they are her/him/me.
On the other hands,
If someone is in my house, I would say:
- There is someone hiding in my house. please, get them out. Instead of saying : “get it out”.
What I want to know is:
Why do we use “it” as an anaphora for someone, in the first example?
However, we do use “them” as an anaphora in the second example given above?
Best Answer
|It is| is used for impersonal statements similar to There is. It's raining; It's snowing; It's a nice day; It's me. The word It in those examples is not used in the sentence as a direct object pronoun.
However, if you want to get someone out of your house, you must use a direct object pronoun:
I want to get him, her, them out of my house. **If the thing is an animal, you would say: I want to get it out of the house.
Here the word it is the third person pronoun for a thing or animal.