c 2017 Vˇera Dvoˇr´akov´a ALL RIGHTS RESERVED GENERIC AND INDEFINITE NULL OBJECTS
BY VERAˇ DVORˇ AKOV´ A´
A dissertation submitted to the Graduate School—New Brunswick Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Program in Linguistics
Written under the direction of Mark Baker and approved by
New Brunswick, New Jersey October, 2017 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION
Generic and indefinite null objects
by Vˇera Dvoˇr´akov´a Dissertation Director: Mark Baker
This thesis is concerned with the syntactic and syntactico semantic properties of two types of non overt internal arguments: the so called generic null objects (GNO), as in Lars von Trier’s movies always shock , and indefinite null objects (INO) as in John reads / is reading . In addition to the known data on GNO and INO, coming mainly from English, Italian, and French, it utilizes data from Czech, a Slavic language with rich inflectional morphology, which enables a novel perspective on how these invisible objects are derived in language.
I argue against the predominant view that GNO are syntactically pronouns (Rizzi 1986; Authier 1992a,b), consisting of a D feature and/or a set of ϕ features (Landau 2010), and possibly receiving case. Evidence is provided that albeit syntactically represented, GNO consist of a single syntactic node, little n, bearing just the interpretable gender feature, but no number or person features. Rather than pronouns with a fully developed nominal functional projection, GNO should be conceived as conceptually impoverished nouns (i.e. not containing any root), whose only semantic contribution is the one associated with an interpretable gender feature on n, namely the property of being Persona or Female Persona. Such nominal heads introduce a variable that gets bound by a generic operator (GEN), along the lines of Heim 1982 and Krifka et al. 1995. The advantage of the proposed analysis over the existing ones is that it can systematically account for both genericity and humanness of GNO without having to stipulate them as separate semantic features associated with
ii GNO. Moreover, it is supported by the existence of the same gender marked silent n in persona denoting nominalized adjectives, outside of the context of generic statements.
For INO, I adopt the general view that they are derived by a locally applying existential quantifier but I refute the theories that locate this operation in the lexicon, either as a rule operating on a given transitive predicate (Bresnan 1978, Dowty 1978, a.o.), or by positing two different predicates, a transitive and an intransitive one (Fodor and Fodor 1980). Instead, I analyze intransitivization as a generalized type shifting operation on a verbalized root that is available if the merger of the little v and a root denotes a binary relation of individuals and events, i.e. if it is of type e, vt (whereby v node is understood in the sense of Marantz 2007, 2013, as a verb