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Part of
Questioning Theoretical Primitives in Linguistic Inquiry: Papers in honor of Ricardo Otheguy
Edited by Naomi Shin and Daniel Erker
[Studies in Functional and Structural Linguistics 76] 2018
► pp. 133–156

Spooky grammatical effects

| The City College of New York

Linguistic constructs often correspond to nothing concrete: Descriptivists’ zero morpheme, generativists’ trace, variationists’ null instantiation, and Columbia School’s null signal. These represent structural relations with no phonetic substance. Columbia School has posited, moreover, three types of relatively insubstantial semantic structure: The residual member and the including member are semantic value oppositions within a grammatical system, each defined by the system’s other members. In the opposition of substance, in my own work, two signals share a value from one semantic substance, but only one of them bears a meaning from an additional semantic substance. All of these constructs are justified by distributional facts within theoretical paradigms. It is possible, too, to distinguish between all of the above and absence.

Keywords: zero, null, Columbia School, residual member, including member, opposition of substance
Article outline
  • 1.The null in mathematics
  • 2.The null in semiotics
    • 2.1Linguistics
      • 2.1.1Saussure to Bloomfield to Chomsky and beyond
      • 2.1.2William Diver and the Columbia School
        • 2.1.2.1Diver and null
        • 2.1.2.2Diver and homonymy in grammar
        • 2.1.2.3Diver’s residual member
        • 2.1.2.4Diver’s opposition of inclusion
      • 2.1.3The opposition of substance
  • 3.Unsignaled structure in music
  • 4.When there’s no there there
    • 4.1Absence studied from a Columbia School linguistic perspective
    • 4.2Absence studied in variationist linguistics
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
  • Sources of data
Published online: 6 December 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/sfsl.76.07dav
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