Empty nouns

Abstract

This paper proposes a novel analysis of phonologically null nouns, unifying them with semantically empty nouns like one. It sets out to show that phonologically null nouns are not instances of the empty category pro, which is a standard analysis for them, and goes on to discuss the shortcomings of pro-based accounts while arguing that empty nouns, whether phonologically null or overt, are listed in the lexicon and have to be learned once, rather than be licensed and identified in every syntactic context they appear. Any co-occurrence restrictions are argued to be the result of restrictions on the lexicon as well as non-syntactic considerations.