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Licensing null arguments in recipes across languages
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 September 2021
Abstract
While much of the literature on recipe contexts has focused on English and the availability of null definite patients, this paper shows that both null agents and null patients are possible in recipes in a range of typologically and genetically diverse languages. It is proposed that null agents in recipes arise due to a variety of syntactic strategies, but null patients are uniformly licensed via a null topic in the left periphery in all the languages considered. These results indicate that while the recipe register does not directly dictate specific syntactic structures such as imperatives or null objects, the register can provide the pragmatic context necessary for certain syntactic processes, such as null topicalization.
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- Research Article
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- © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press
Footnotes
We would like to thank Henrison Hsieh, Eric Potsdam, Yves Roberge and Vesela Simeonova for helpful discussion, and Michelle Troberg for triggering this research. We are also grateful to Vololona Rasolofoson for her insights into the Malagasy data and to Ofania Ikiua and Lynsey Talagi for sharing their expertise in the Niue language. In addition, three anonymous Journal of Linguistics referees provided many helpful suggestions and questions. Any errors or omissions remain our own. This research was partially funded by a SSHRC Insight Grant to Ileana Paul (435-2019-0581) and by a SSHRC Insight Grant to Diane Massam (435-2015-1987).
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