Chet:
> Those bother me less than those lovely examples in your paper 
> which contract
> structure-sharing with PRO, such as:
> (41) a. pre'pei soi einai prothu'mo:i / prothu'mon
>         befits you(dat.) to+be zealous(dat.) / zealous(acc.)
> 	`It befits you to be zealous'

I'm hoping someone will find the time to recapitulate these
arguments, or possibly email me a copy of the paper....

> Your other comments will take more time to assimilate, but they appear
> on the face of it to be adequate (as a response).  Alas.

I understand your & Nik's & others' disquiet at the existence of
null words, since they definitely relax restrictions on the set
of grammars that the theory can express. However, I gave an 
argument in an earlier message that even before you consider
any actual data, if you think about how language must work, 
you're forced to the conclusion that in principle some null 
words must be able to exist, unless you can find some 
nonmetatheoretical reason for excluding them.

To me this is just an instance of the more obvious fact that
form and meaning are not isomorphic -- that it is not the case
that the compositional semantic structure is read directly
off compositional phonological structure. If that fact weren't 
so obvious, people would bemoan its metatheoretical 
undesirability too.

--And.


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