Some Unpopular Analyses of Sentences and Constructions with Missing Constituents

Abstract

One very obvious fact about any natural language that linguists do not generally give importance to is the disparity between the number of nameable objects and notions in the environment, consciousness and experience of its speakers and the number of readily available words for these objects and notions. At any given time the nameable objects easily outnumber the words. The main reason for the lack of designation for many objects is the fact that there is no reason for people to talk about them. In all Philippine languages that I know there is no reason to be talking about the vertical canal or depression under the nose. Naturally there is no single-word designation for it. People do not carry objects on the back of the hand. There is therefore no word for the action, since there is no need to mention the notion in the first place. But there are also many entities involved in our thoughts and notions and therefore worth talking about that are nameless and have been so for centuries. These are the nouns and verbs and possibly other categories that exist only in the semantic consciousness of speakers and are never assigned lexical representation. The resulting gaps in the lexicon have some important connection with the existence of many sentences and constructions with missing surface constituents. Some of those constructions are often considered unique or near-unique characteristics of Philippine languages.

I shall survey in this paper the more important of these constructions and try to show how they can’t be analyzed in terms of the role played by lexical gaps. I shall dwell at some length on meteorological and temporal sentences because they are most amenable to an analysis that makes use of the notion “unrealized” constituent.