2010/07/01 by Idan Landau · 1 citation
Arts and Humanities · Psychology · #Language, Metaphor, and Cognition #Linguistics and Discourse Analysis #Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation
paper · doi:10.1162/ling_a_00001
crossref issued 2010/07/01 · crossref published 2010/07/01 · crossref published-print 2010/07/01 · openalex publication_date 2010/07/01 · crossref created 2010/07/08 · crossref deposited 2021/03/12 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/26 · crossref indexed 2026/07/29
Although they participate in control relations, implicit arguments are standardly viewed as unprojected ϑ-roles, absent from the syntax. I challenge this view and argue that implicit arguments are syntactically represented. The argument rests on the observation that implicit arguments can exercise partial control, and the claim that partial control must be encoded in the syntax (given plausible assumptions on the limits of lexical relations). I further argue that the syntactic constitution of implicit arguments is more impoverished than that of pro, explaining their differential visibility to various syntactic processes.