•  
  •  
 

Abstract

Silence in language is rarely a simple absence. From the structural zero of an unmarked morpheme to the syntactically articulated gap left by ellipsis, what is not pronounced is frequently as grammatically consequential as what is. This study examines three manifestations of grammatical silence—zero-marking, null argumenthood, and ellipsis—across Arabic, Persian, and English. Arabic and Persian are null-subject languages with rich agreement morphology, whereas English is a non-null-subject language with impoverished agreement. Arabic additionally exhibits a zero copula in present-tense nominal sentences, while Persian and English display distinct inventories of elliptical constructions. Drawing on a comparative corpus of 360 constructed and attested examples (120 per language), the study adopts a qualitative comparative–syntactic design supplemented by descriptive quantification. The findings show that null subjects were the dominant silence type in Arabic (48/120) and Persian (42/120), whereas English exhibited very few null subjects (6/120); conversely, VP-ellipsis was dominant in English (38/120) and rare in Arabic (6/120) and Persian (10/120). Agreement was the principal identification mechanism in Arabic and Persian, while focus-semantic givenness and discourse salience predominated in English. The study argues that the grammar of omission is shaped by the interaction of agreement morphology, argument structure, and the syntax–discourse interface, and that zero-marking, null argumenthood, and ellipsis, while distinct in their licensing conditions, are unified by their phonological nullity and their syntactic and semantic activity. The findings have implications for language teaching, translation, and natural language processing, where the correct interpretation of unpronounced material is essential.

First Page

1345

Last Page

1355

Download

Share

COinS