<!doctype html public «-//w3c//dtd html 4.0 transitional//en»> http-equiv=content-type> Based on the analysis of texts written between 1650 and 2000 and characterized by their use of language of proximity, this study discusses the German pronoun es. The first section provides a semantic and morphosyntactic description of the phoric use of es. The second section discusses possibilities of a description of non-phoric es, based on the principles of valence theory and construction grammar.
