Empty Categories Research Articles

Sentence processing without empty categories

Abstract Theories of sentence processing have standardly made use of grammatical theories with empty categories, and have therefore postulated a process known as “gap-filling”. In contrast, this paper provides evidence that the processing of unbounded dependencies does not make use of empty categories. We propose instead that there is a direct association between the extracted element and its subcategoriser. To show that gap-filling cannot take place, we consider a number of examples where there is material separating the assumed empty category and the subcategoriser, and then present a formal argument, based on patterns of dependencies in sentences involving multiple cases of extraction. We then sketch a linguistic account of unbounded dependencies that does not use empty categories, and which can serve as the basis of a processing model. We conclude that empty categories are not psychologically real.

Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color

Over the last two decades, women have organized against the almost routine violence that shapes their lives. Drawing from the strength of shared experience, women have recognized that the political demands of millions speak more powerfully than the pleas of a few isolated voices. This politicization in turn has transformed the way we understand violence against women. For example, battering and rape, once seen as private (family matters) and aberrational (errant sexual aggression), are now largely recognized as part of a broad-scale system of domination that affects women as a class. This process of recognizing as social and systemic what was formerly perceived as isolated and individual has also characterized the identity politics of people of and gays and lesbians, among others. For all these groups, identity-based politics has been a source of strength, community, and intellectual development. The embrace of identity politics, however, has been in tension with dominant conceptions of social justice. Race, gender, and other identity categories are most often treated in mainstream liberal discourse as vestiges of bias or domination-that is, as intrinsically negative frameworks in which social power works to exclude or marginalize those who are different. According to this understanding, our liberatory objective should be to empty such categories of any social significance. Yet implicit in certain strands of feminist and racial liberation movements, for example, is the view that the social power in delineating difference need not be the power of domination; it can instead be the source of political empowerment and social reconstruction. The problem with identity politics is not that it fails to transcend difference, as some critics charge, but rather the opposite- that it frequently conflates or ignores intra group differences. In the context of violence against women, this elision of difference is problematic, fundamentally because the violence that many women experience is often shaped by other dimensions of their identities, such as race and class. Moreover, ignoring differences within groups frequently contributes to tension among groups, another problem of identity politics that frustrates efforts to politicize violence against women. Feminist efforts to politicize experiences of women and antiracist efforts to politicize experiences of people of color' have frequently proceeded as though the issues and experiences they each detail occur on mutually exclusive terrains. Al-though racism and sexism readily intersect in the lives of real people, they seldom do in feminist and antiracist practices. And so, when the practices expound identity as woman or person of color as an either/or proposition, they relegate the identity of women of to a location that resists telling. My objective here is to advance the telling of that location by exploring the race and gender dimensions of violence against women of color. Contemporary feminist and antiracist discourses have failed to consider the intersections of racism and patriarchy. Focusing on two dimensions of male violence against women-battering and rape-I consider how the experiences of women of are frequently the product of intersecting patterns of racism and sexism, and how these experiences tend not to be represented within the discourse of either feminism or antiracism... Language: en

Processing of empty categories in Japanese

Recent experimental research on the processing of empty categories (EC) in English points to the general conclusion that during on-line processing of a sentence, not only is the presence of an EC detected but its linguistically legitimate antecedents are also computed. In this paper, it is argued that, in Japanese, ECs pose serious problems for on-line processing if they are to be processed in a manner similar to English. Initial experimental data indicates that, in Japanese, the processor may not recognize an EC during initial on-line processing of a sentence. It is tentatively suggested that processing of an EC in Japanese may be delayed until after the on-line processing of the structure of a sentence.

A primer on PRO (and other empty categories)

GB phrase markers are populated with empty categories that are hard to detect using current psycholinguistic techniques. What implications does this have for a grammatical theory that postulates them? How might these psycholinguistic facts be accommodated? Some modest proposals are offered for further consideration.

Operators and Empty Categories in Japanese

Operators and Empty Categories in Japanese

HIV, heroin and heterosexual relations

This ethnographic study describes part of the social context in which heterosexual transmission of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) may be taking place. Based on interviews with sex partners of intravenous (IV) drug users in an urban, African American community of the United States, the study documents the personal experience of 35 men and women to show how living with one's own and/or one's partner's heroin habit may structure one's response to public health information and one's possibility of becoming infected with HIV. As described by sex partners of intravenous drug users, people who use heroin habitually are drawn into social networks that are loosely organized according to their preferred route of drug administration, i.e. ‘shooters’ (intravenous) and ‘tooters’ (intranasal), both of which tend to exclude ‘squares’ (non-use). Social divisions such as these may slow rates of HIV transmission to those outside the drug life. But nevertheless, as sex partners explain, there are many types of social and sexual exchanges taking place among shooters, tooters and squares, including but not limited to the exchange of bodily fluids. Ethnography analyzes discursive representations of such exchanges, filling in and questioning the empty categories of epidemiological prediction. How does risky behavior actually figure in the lives of individuals who happen to fall in the category of ‘sex partner”? How is sexual behavior shaped by drug use behavior? Being sexually involved with an IV drug user for some years alters a person's relative position betwixt and between the drug subculture, on the one hand, and mainstream pursuits of family, work and church, on the other. Differences in personal need and group identity create conflicts. Couples in long-term relationships develop rules to manage these. But in which terms will they interpret and negotiate the new threat of AIDS? If the strategic aspect of discursive representations of experience is taken into account, and if discursive representations are interpreted within appropriate social and historical contexts, they can provide a rich source of material for understanding the social impact of the AIDS epidemic. Without this discursive dimension, analytic power to interpret seroprevalence data cross-culturally would be lacking. In addition, and independently of the problem of interpreting seroprevalence data, ethnographic analysis links local, culturally-specific meanings through which AIDS is interpreted to our understanding of AIDS as a global phenomena.

A Course in GB Syntax: Lectures on Binding and Empty Categories

A Course in GB Syntax is a new kind of linguistics textbook. It presents the fundamental concepts of the Government-Binding approach to syntax in a lecture-dialogue format that conveys the sense of a changing field, with live issues under debate.Students and professionals seeking a lucid introduction to the complexities of GB syntax will have the experience of participating in an actual course taught by a major practitioner. The presentation of fundamentals is followed by further examples, easily understandable discussion of technical questions, and alternative analyses within the same basic framework.The book fits welI between a more general introduction like van Riemsdijk and Williams' Introduction to the of Grammar and the major GB literature. While it has been designed for use by graduate students in a second semester syntax course, it can serve as a reader's companion to important but sometimes forbidding texts like Noam Chomsky's Lectures on Government and Binding and Some Concepts and Consequences of the of Government and Binding.The informal tone makes the subject more approachable; examples are worked out more slowly and in greater detail than is possible in the primary sources; and the definitions and notational devices are carefully explained. Finally, many of the questions that the student might want to raise are raised (in fact, by students) and answers and alternatives are explored.The lectures give an overview of the modular GB model and cover in detail Case theory; Binding Theory; the determination of empty categories, parasitic gaps, and the Empty Category Principle; extensions and alternatives, such as Aoun's Generalized Binding Theory and Higginbotham's linking analysis, and various open questions, such as the nature of the Case filter, tough movement, weak crossover, illicit NP-movement, and topicalization.Howard Lasnik is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Connecticut. Juan Uriagereka, one of his graduate students, transcribed and did the initial editing of the tapes of the original lectures. Current Studies in Linguistics.

“Full hearts” & empty Pronominals in Thai

Abstract The Thai noun cay, roughly ‘heart, mind, disposition’, occurs frequently in informal speech and in literary texts, forming some three hundred compounds that provide Thai speakers with a rich “vocabulary of the emotions”. A number of subtypes of these these “emotion predicates” are distinguished, some showing variation in terms of relative lexicalisation. Related to this are thematic‐role subcategorisations and the problem of whether “superimposed” thematic roles are licensed. These questions, along with constituency issues and the determining of empty categories and their anaphoric linkages in complement constructions, are shown to be related to factors in the compositional semantics of the compounds. For a given cay compound, depending on subtype, there are certain ways in which the heart/mind is typically conceptualised or metaphorically presented; such conceptualisations lie behind construction types organising constituency, anaphoric binding and predicate relations in superficial syntax.

Influences of Typological Parameters on L2 Learners’ Judgments of Null Pronouns in English*

This study examines the responses of 60 Spanish, Chinese, and German L2 learners to English sentences with empty pronominal categories (ECs). Empty pronouns are not only acceptable in finite clauses of Spanish and Chinese but are pragmatically more natural (Rizzi, 1982; Huang, 1984, 1985). However, the phenomena are not sanctioned in standard German, which is similar to the condition for English. These facts were taken to indicate that the parametric apparatus governing pronoun conduct in the L1 of the Spanish and Chinese L2 learners would be less like that of German learners to a significant degree. It was also expected that if all three groups were asked to judge and edit English sentences with null pronouns, the Spanish and Chinese Ss would make significantly more errors than would the German Ss because of parametric adjustments than the former two groups would need to make. But this outcome was not fully supported by the data as it was only the Spanish Ss and not the Chinese Ss whose mean errors were significantly higher than those of the German group. Evidence indicated that typological parameters linked to pragmatic versus syntactic motivations of L1 had to be considered in accounting for the results.

Null objects in Brazilian Portuguese

An analysis of null object constructions in colloquial Brazilian Portuguese is brought to bear on the theory of empty categories. Focusing on their properties in adjunct clauses, it is argued that at least some null objects must be analyzed as pro's, even though they are not morphologically identified. An empty topic variable approach (Huang, 1984) is argued to be empirically inadequate and to have no explanatory advantage over an analysis on which all null objects are pro's, in spite of the fact that there exist gaps in the distribution of null objects that appear to support the empty topic hypothesis. Brazilian Portuguese is shown to be a language that requires subject pro to be identified. It is suggested that object pro must also be identified and that the notion of what counts as identification must be broad enough to include the possibility of intrinsic specification of features. In the absence of identifying features on its govverning head, pro is predictably third person.

Follicular fluid renin concentration and IVF outcome

Total renin protein concentration (TRC) was measured in stored follicular fluid (FF) samples from 42 women. Samples were selected according to their origin from follicles either without recovered ova ('empty', n = 38) or fertilized but with failed implantation ('failed', n = 36) or successful deliveries ('deliveries', n = 71). Ratios of number of embryos transferred to number of infants delivered were 2:1, 3:1 or 4:2 but 1:1 was not available. Non-parametric testing was applied to FF-TRC, volume and outcome. TRC was significantly higher in the delivery than the failed (P = 0.001) or empty (P = 0.002) categories. Assuming that the range of renin in failed follicles can identify the sub-population of unsuccessful follicles in the delivery category, then elevated FF-TRC was clearly associated with successful outcome. For individual women, the odds of infant delivery increased 17-fold as a function of average FF-TRC between 10,000 and 25,000 microIU/ml. For failed and delivery but not empty follicles, higher renin levels occurred in the smaller follicles, consistent with a burst of renin synthesis associated with the presence of an oocyte. The results suggest that FF-TRC relates to ovum viability with ovarian hyperstimulation and may have predictive use in IVF programmes.

Complementizer PA, the Finiteness of its Complements and Some Remarks on Empty Categories in Papiamento

Complementizer PA, the Finiteness of its Complements and Some Remarks on Empty Categories in Papiamento

Empty categories in sentence processing

Abstract An empty category is an inaudible/invisible constituent of a sentence, postulated by linguists to account for certain regularities of sentence structure. To identify an empty category and associate it with an antecedent that will determine its interpretation, a sentence processing device must apply considerable linguistic knowledge, both universal and language-particular. Experiments show that human processing of empty category constructions is efficient and linguistically informed. Different linguistic theories postulate different empty categories. Recent and ongoing experiments by several researchers attempt to determine which kinds of empty categories are recognised by the human processor. Assuming a transparent relationship between the parser and the grammar, the results of these studies could contribute to the evaluation of competing linguistic theories.

Irish autonomous impersonals

This paper investigates Irish impersonal sentences marked by the inflection traditionally known as “autonomous” and examines ways to account for the empty subject position in such sentences. The various empty categories of Government-Binding Theory are considered. It is argued that the best candidate for the subject of the impersonal construction is arbitrary PRO, in contrast to other languages such as Spanish, which has been analyzed as having an arbitrary pro subject. Some problems resulting from allowing PRO in a tensed S are discussed. The proposed solution is linked to the fact that Irish tensed clauses need not include AGR.

A Grammar of Anaphora

The study of anaphoric expressions -- especially reflexives and reciprocals -- has played an increasingly important role in linguistic theory. Within the Extended Standard Theory, the central notions of government and binding have depended crucially on the proper understanding of anaphoric relations. A Grammar of Anaphora offers the most comprehensive and significant treatment of such phenomena currently available. Its theoretical and empirical investigation of the notions of anaphora and of binding in syntax should define the direction of research in this field for the next decade.In Chomsky's Government-Binding (G-B) framework the relationship between an anaphoric expression and its antecedent is constrained by certain binding principles. This book argues that another kind of anaphoric relation exists, beyond those defined by Chomsky's framework. Its generalization of binding extends the theory so that it can solve various conceptual and empirical problems that it originally raised, and provides a unified explanation of seemingly unrelated phenomena in a host of constructions and languages. The book is also able to dispense with the Empty Category Principle which has been a major focus within G-B theory. It proposes instead a structural unification of the notions of pronouns, empty categories, and anaphors which leads to new insights in areas never treated in a coherent way before.

The manileft tiwithout a trace: A case study of aphasic processing of empty categories

Abstract We present the case of an aphasic patient who shows a selective impairment in interpreting syntactic structures on a test of sentence comprehension involving object manipulation. KG makes errors in assigning the antecedents of phonologically empty NPs called traces (Chomsky, 1982 a,b) in sentences like John seems to Bill to be shaving. He is significantly better at choosing the correct antecedent of another type of empty NP, namely subject- and object- controlled PRO (John persuaded Bill to shave, John promised Bill to shave). He has no trouble choosing the correct antecedents of overt pronouns and reflexives and shows no difficulty with syntactic structures that do not contain an empty category. His difficulty with trace is apparent in sentences which have a certain degree of complexity. He also misassigns the antecedent of subject-controlled PRO under one condition: when an overt reflexive or pronoun has PRO as its antecedent (John promised Bill to shave himself). The pattern of impairment suggests that KG cannot utilise one part of a parser/interpreter specifically devoted to the identification and co-indexation of empty categories when other processing demands are high, due to a specific impairment to this component, a capacity limitation, or both. The data support a theory of syntactic structure and parsing which incorporates different types of empty categories.

Some Concepts and Consequences of the Theory of Government and Binding

Noam Chomsky, more than any other researcher, has radically restructured the study of human language over the past several decades. While the study of government and binding is an outgrowth of Chomsky's earlier work in transformational grammar, it represents a significant shift in focus and a new direction of investigation into the fundamentals of linguistic theory.This monograph consolidates and extends this new approach. It serves as a concise introduction to government-binding theory, applies it to several new domains of empirical data, and proposes some revisions to the principles of the theory that lead to greater unification, descriptive scope, and explanatory depth.Earlier work in the theory of grammar was concerned primarily with rule systems. The accent in government-binding theory, however, is on systems of principles of universal grammar. In the course of this book, Chomsky proposes and evaluates various general principles that limit and constrain the types of rules that are possible, and the ways they interact and function. In particular, he proposes that rule systems are in fact highly restricted in variety: only a finite number of grammars are attainable in principle, and these fall into a limited set of types.Another consequence of this shift in focus is the change of emphasis from derivations to representations. The major topic in the study of syntactic representations is the analysis of empty categories, which is a central theme of the book. After his introductory comments and a chapter on the variety of rule system, Chomsky takes up, in turn, the general properties of empty categories, the functional determination of empty categories, parasitic gaps, and binding theory and the typology of empty categories.Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor at MIT. The book is the sixth in the series Linguistic Inquiry Monographs, edited by Samuel Jay Keyser.

L'ellipse Zeugmatique et le Principe de Récupérabilité

This paper attempts to show that, within a grammatical framework allowing for "empty nodes" in syntactic representations, a crucial theoretical distinction should be drawn between empty categories as defined in the Governement-and-Binding literature: pro, PRO, trace), and elliptical (or: zeugmatic) gaps, such as the empty slots in "Gapped", or "VP Deletion" sentences, once derived through "deletion under identity". Through a brief study of two groups of examples involving Gapping, and "Comparative Deletion", it is suggested that unlike empty categories, which, supposedly, fall under the scope of Core Grammar, elliptical (zeugmatic) gaps abide by distinct linguistic principles, some of which outside the scope of sentence grammar, including a functional Recoverability Principle, and constraints on discourse anaphora.

Aspects of empty categories in Xhosa within the theory of government and binding

The approach to subject- and object-verb agreement within the government-binding (GB) theory of transformational generative grammar is reviewed. The principles of this approach are applied in the analysis of agreement in Xhosa. It is shown that the phonologically null element or empty category, pro, plays a major role in Xhosa syntax. A crucial question concerning subject- and object-verb agreement is: What is the syntactic status of the subjectival and objectival concord in Xhosa? In the case of subject-verb agreement, constructions are examined, both in which the subjectival concord co-occurs with a lexical NP subject and in which it does not. Similarly, in the case of the clitic, constructions are reviewed in which the clitic is associated with an object NP, and in which it is not. The argument applied in the analysis of subject- and object-verb agreement, is extended to the analysis of modifier-verb agreement, agreement in prepositional phrases, copulative constructions and possessive constructions. T...