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Licensing null arguments in recipes across languages

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 September 2021

ILEANA PAUL Open the ORCID record for ILEANA PAUL [Opens in a new window]  and
DIANE MASSAM Open the ORCID record for DIANE MASSAM [Opens in a new window]
ILEANA PAUL
Affiliation:
French Studies, University of Western Ontario, 1151 Richmond Street, London, ON, N6A3K7 Canada ileana@uwo.ca
DIANE MASSAM
Affiliation:
Department of Linguistics, University of Toronto, Sidney Smith Hall, 4th floor, 100 St. George Street, Toronto, ON, M5S 3G3 Canada diane.massam@utoronto.ca
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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.

Keywords

Malagasynull objectsnull topicalizationrecipe contextstopic-drop
Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Linguistics , Volume 57 , Issue 4 , November 2021 , pp. 815 - 839
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Copyright
© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

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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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