Abstract

"Missing NPs, Licensing and Structures"

Empty categories, which played prominent roles in the theory of Government and Binding, are simply non-pronounced copies of lexical items under a movement approach to Binding and Control. In addition, an influential approach to ellipsis (e.g., sluicing,VP-ellipsis, NP-ellipsis) utilizes PF-deletion – copies not spelled out. It seems that empty categories are no longer needed in syntax and the notion of empty category becomes dispensable. In this talk, I will show that syntactic structures still contain empty categories with distinct characteristics licensed in different syntactic positions. Evidence comes from the various interpretive and grammatical (im)possibilities of missing arguments in clauses and missing NPs within nominal expressions in Mandarin Chinese, in contrast to the similar but not identical Japanese counterparts. Differences between the two languages will be shown to follow from the variations in nominal structures. I will also demonstrate the need to recognize the true emptiness of “elided” elements syntactically - the elided elements lacking in contents accessible to grammatical processes.