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Complementation in Italian: Phonetically Null Vs. Totally Absent Complements

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 March 2026

Donna Jo Napoli
Donna Jo Napoli*
Affiliation:
University of Michigan
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Abstract

Italian sentences which appear to lack propositional arguments of verbs are shown to be base-generated without these verb complements. This analysis accounts for a wide range of syntactic and semantic data, including the fact that movement rules never appear to have operated out of missing complements. The possibility for a given lexical item to lack such a complement is arbitrary (i.e., it is a subcategorization fact); the so-called missing complement need not be associated with a specific interpretation. The polarity, tense, and person of a verb affect the possibility of its allowing a missing complement.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 61 , Issue 1 , March 1985 , pp. 73 - 94
Copyright
Copyright © 1985 by Linguistic Society of America

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Footnotes

*

For discussion of many of the issues in this paper at a very early stage in my study, I thank Edwin Williams, Alexa McCray, Muffy Siegel, and Emily Rando. For comments on an earlier version of this paper, I am grateful to Giulio Lepschy, Rita Manzini, and Fritz Newmeyer. For help far beyond that usually expected of native speakers, I thank Maria Rosaria Vitti Alexander, Lina Buzzi, Frank Casa, Attilio Cassinelli, Elena Girelli Ellenwood, Enrico Ercole, Mariuccia Rossi, and Silvia Vattuoni.

The initial research for this paper was supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. BNS-8017055. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed here are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the NSF. This work was completed with support from the University of Michigan under Rackham Faculty Research Grant #387829. I am grateful to the NSF and to the University of Michigan for this support.

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