In the early '80s, largely due to Chomsky’s Lectures on Government and Binding and ensuing research, a kind of encompassing theory of "empty elements" had emerged. This theory was largely concerned with silent subjects, silent pronominals, and various kinds of traces of movement. Since then, however, the picture has become more blurred. More types of empty elements were proposed, ellipsis phenomena began to receive some attention, and interface issues arose: are silent elements silent due to deletion (or failure to be spelled out) at the phonetic interface or are they independently existing items in the lexicon that simply fail to have a phonetic form?

Furthermore, silent elements are also ubiquitous in phonology and similar questions arise: can syllables have empty nuclei, can segments fail to be pronounced when they are not properly attached to a slot in a (supra-) segmental structure?

Sounds of Silence is an attempt to bring together a number of original contributions that all address such questions. And while a new encompassing theory is not yet in sight, this book helps pave the way.

Table of Contents: Sounds of Silence (Preliminary)

(Morpho-)Phonology

Benjaballah, Sabrina & Martin Haiden A typology of emptiness in templates

Côté, Marie Hélène Empty elements in schwa, liaison and h-aspiré: the French Holy Trinity revisited

Lowenstamm, Jean On n, √, and types of nouns

Scheer, Tobias Why the Prosodic Hierarchy is a diacritic and why the Interface must be direct

Syntax

Bošković, Željko On Successive Cyclic Movement and the Freezing Effect of Feature Checking Kallulli, Dalina Resumption and relativization and information structure

Kato, Takaomi ATB distribution of in-situ-wh-phrases: A case for the null operator approach to wh-in-situ phrases in Japanese

Surányi, Balázs The Theory of Head Movement and Cyclic Spell-Out

About the NHLS series: The goal of this collection is to put at the disposal of the linguistic community studies which contribute to a deeper understanding of the nature of linguistic variation within the generative tradition that has been developing since the middle of the twentieth century.

The series will pay particular attention to the tension between descriptive and explanatory adequacy more accurately reformulated as a tension between the simplicity of the language faculty and its apparent complexity. Volumes will cover the traditional domain of syntactic studies, but will also include related areas such as semantics, morphology, phonology, and the lexicon. The series aims at distributing studies which constitute important contributions to the field, in particular to the domain of micro- and macro- variation, which are currently difficult to access.

The particular aim of the series is to publish both theoretical and empirical studies of language. Although the main focus of the series will be on generative linguistics, it will not exclude studies of a more general nature or from different schools of thought, insofar as they contribute to the advancement of the generative program.