Silently Structured Silent Argument

Theoretical linguistics in the generative tradition has payed much attention to issues related to silence ? children know the syntax of silence despite the fact that they do not have direct access to it throughout their language acquisition process. One of the issues that have been hotly discussed regarding silence in natural languages is whether it involves syntactic structure or not. This book is concerned with a particular instance of silence in natural languages, what is called radical pro-drop, showing that it is silently structured on the basis of novel data from Japanese as well as Chinese, Korean, Mongolian, and Turkish. The discussion in this book also has consequences for the dichotomy between PF-deletion vs. LF-copying, shedding a new light on the proper analysis of several syntactic phenomena in Japanese, including wh-in-situ and control.

Željko Boškovic, University of Connecticut:
This impressive investigation of the nature of null arguments in radical pro-drop languages not only significantly broadens the empirical scope of the phenomenon and establishes new ways to probe into its nature but also draws a host of extremely important conclusions with respect to a number of more general theoretical issues, especially regarding the licensing and nature of ellipsis, with a conclusive resolution of the long-standing debate whether ellipsis should be treated in terms of LF copying or PF deletion.