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Empty Categories

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingEntry for encyclopedia/dictionaryAcademicpeer-review

Abstract

he concept of Empty Category plays an important role in Generative Grammar. The claim is that syntactic structures may contain empty (or ‘covert’ or ‘null’) categories, that is categories which have no overt phonological properties, and therefore no phonetic form. They are silent, only ‘seen’ by the mind as it computes the structure of a sentence.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationInternational Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics
EditorsHilary Nesi, Petar Milin
PublisherElsevier
Edition3
ISBN (Electronic)9780443222863
ISBN (Print)978032395504
Publication statusPublished - 1 Jun 2026

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