I'm told

[Paul J Hopper]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
A footnote to Benji's posting: the special behavior of "it" has often
been noticed. To his point about "it" shunning stress in Present-Day
English can be added the absence or rarity of the possessive pronoun
"its", which results in a hole in the paradigm (the hat is mine/?the lid
is its). Yet apparently in older Germanic the reverse was the case:
exophoric "that" was rare, "it" (OE hit) being used instead (see S O
Andrew, Syntax & Style in OE, p. 38). The same seems to be true of Old
High German (Behaghel, Deutsche Syntax I:280).
 
- Paul Hopper