Null constituents

Overview

So far, our discussion of syntactic structure has tacitly assumed that all constituents in a given structure are overt (in the sense that they have overt phonetic features, as well as grammatical and semantic features). However, we will argue that syntactic structures may also contain null constituents (also known as empty categories) – i.e. constituents which have grammatical and semantic features but lack phonetic features (and so are ‘silent’ or ‘inaudible’).