Is there anything there when there is not there? Null expletives and second language data  

Oleh:

Oshita, Hiroyuki

Jenis: Article from Journal - ilmiah internasional
Dalam koleksi: Second Language Research (Full Text & ada di PROQUEST) vol. 20 no. 2 (Apr. 2004), page 95 130.
Topik: Null expletives and second language data
Fulltext: Hiroyuki Oshita.pdf (290.29KB)

Isi artikel

This article explores the issue of the psychological reality of null expletives, i.e., the silent counterparts of the so-called dummy subjects such as English it and there. Following JackendoŒ’s (1997; 2002) notion of `defective’ lexical item, I de ne null expletives as extremely `defective’ words with syntactic properties but no semantic or phonological content. By comparing native speakers of pro-drop languages and those of topic-drop languages in terms of their grammatical judgement of and productive use of English, I argue that null expletives are very likely psychologically real to speakers of pro-drop languages but not to those of topic-drop languages. This conclusion is based on observations made in previous second language (L2) studies and the analysis of data obtained from a large corpus of nonnative English. The question of the unaccusative¡unergative distinction in L2 grammar and the linguistic characterization of so-called free subject¡verb inversion in pro-drop languages are also discussed in relation to the issue of the psychological reality of null expletives.

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