The Silence of Heads

Abstract

On the basis of considerations involving complementizers, sentence-final particles, need, aspect, tense, focus and topic, agreement morphemes, determiners, verbrelated particles and adpositions, I reach the conclusion that many more heads in the sentential projection line (and elsewhere) must be taken to be silent than is usually thought. I then argue that this state of affairs ultimately reflects the fact that every projecting head is silent.

Keywords

• complementizer
• sentence-final particle
• silence
• tense
• feature