37.1440, Diss: Ibero-Romance; Spanish; Linguistic Theories, Semantics, Syntax: Carlos Martínez-García: "Null Objects in Spanish: Analysis Proposal and Theoretical Consequences"

Tue Apr 14 14:05:02 UTC 2026

LINGUIST List: Vol-37-1440. Tue Apr 14 2026. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 37.1440, Diss: Ibero-Romance; Spanish; Linguistic Theories, Semantics, Syntax: Carlos Martínez-García: "Null Objects in Spanish: Analysis Proposal and Theoretical Consequences"

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Date: 14-Apr-2026
From: Carlos Martínez-García [carlos.martinez at urjc.es]
Subject: Null Objects in Spanish: Analysis Proposal and Theoretical Consequences

Institution: Lengua Española y sus Literaturas
Degree Date: 2025

Dissertation Title: Null Objects in Spanish: Analysis Proposal and
Theoretical Consequences

Dissertation URL:
https://docta.ucm.es/entities/publication/eeaafd57-8c95-4889-9887-750239447fb7

Linguistic Field(s): Linguistic Theories
                     Semantics
                     Syntax

Subject Language(s): Spanish (spa)

Language Family(ies): Ibero-Romance

Dissertation Director(s): Manuel Leonetti, Cristina Sánchez López,
Victoria Escandell Vidal

Dissertation Abstract:

This thesis studies the syntax and semantics of null objects in
Spanish. Null objects are grammatical elements that, despite not being
uttered, are interpreted and display syntactic structure (e.g., En
esta escuela castigan Ø con dureza ‘In this school they punish
harshly’; Buscaban defectos de forma, pero no encontraron Ø ‘They were
looking for formal defects, but found none’). Despite the interest
aroused by null objects in Romance languages, null objects of Spanish
have gone almost unnoticed in the literature, so there is a lack of a
deep analysis of their syntactic and semantic properties. This thesis
aims to fill this gap by means of a thorough study that will broaden
our knowledge of null objects in general and Spanish indefinite null
objects in particular.
The main goal of this thesis is to explain the phonological,
morphosyntactic and semantic properties of anaphoric indefinite null
arguments in Spanish in a conceptually and empirically coherent way,
and to explore the theoretical consequences derived from the existence
of indefinite null arguments. Specifically, it is argued that
indefinite null objects are elided NPs. This goal is achieved by
postulating as few grammatical operations as possible, so that the
grammatical properties of indefinite null objects are deduced from
general principles of Spanish grammar. Additionally, the analysis is
extended to indefinite null subjects in Spanish and to indefinite null
objects in Portuguese.
Firstly (Part I), a rigorous description of the types of null objects
in Spanish is provided: definite, indefinite and generic. The
classification is based on the fact that each type of null object
shows different grammatical features, different distributional
properties and different constraints. This reveals that certain (a
priori) non-spelled out elements are not null objects per se (such as
cognate objects of activity predicates), that other types of null
objects (indefinites and generics) belong to general Spanish and that
definite null objects are subject to dialectal (contact Spanish) and
diaphasic (instructional contexts like recipes) variation.
Secondly (Part II), previous analyses of Spanish indefinite null
objects are refuted (wh-trace, null “partitive” clitic, nominal
ellipsis, nP), given that they do not explain their properties.
Instead, an analysis by means of argument ellipsis is proposed,
specifically by means of NP-ellipsis. The analysis relies on the idea
that the indefinite null object is interpreted in Logical Form and is
syntactically projected as an NP, but its phonological features are
deleted in Phonological Form. In other words, indefinite null objects
are NPs whose difference with common NPs is that they are
phonologically null. This deletion operation is subject to the general
constraints of recovery and licensing of ellipsis (the Parallelism
Condition and the Formal Licensing Condition). This analysis explains
that indefinite null objects show the same semantic and syntactic
characteristics as bare nouns, which are NPs licensed in object
positions.
Thirdly (Part III), the extension of this analysis to indefinite null
subjects, which show exactly the same properties as anaphoric
indefinite null objects, with which they are in complementary
distribution, is explored. It is concluded that both phenomena are the
same: indefinite argument drop. The finding of indefinite null
subjects in Spanish contradicts the literature on null subjects in
consistent null-subject languages such as Spanish and has a great
impact on parametric theory, since it has been traditionally said that
null subjects can only receive definite interpretations in consistent
null-subject languages. Additionally, it is shown how the properties
and distribution of Spanish indefinite null arguments can be explained
by basic principles of Spanish grammar, such as the distribution of
bare nouns, and the impact this may have on parametric theory and the
relation between the distribution of bare nouns and other phenomena,
such as nominal ellipsis and “partitive” clitics in Romance, are
explored. The idea that the empty category  pro and argument ellipsis
can coexist in the same language is also explored. It is proposed that
Spanish is an illustrative case: preverbal definite null subjects
behave as pro, while postverbal indefinite null subjects are elided
arguments. Finally, the proposal is extended to Romance languages such
as European Portuguese.
In short, this thesis studies for the first time the grammatical
phenomenon of indefinite null objects in Spanish in a detailed way.
The research is organized around three central problems: (i) the
nature, grammatical properties and distribution of indefinite null
objects in Spanish; (ii) the analysis that explains the grammatical
properties and distribution of indefinite null objects in Spanish;
(iii) the theoretical consequences derived from the study of
indefinite null arguments in Spanish.
In order to improve the empirical coverage and to facilitate
cross-linguistic comparisons, this thesis examines data from different
Romance languages (European and American Spanish, European and
Brazilian Portuguese, Italian, French and Catalan), Asian languages
(Japanese, Javanese and Korean), Hellenic languages (Modern Greek),
Dravidian languages (Malayalam), Turkic languages (Turkish), Germanic
languages (English), Slavic languages (Czech and Russian),
Eskimo-Aleut languages (Western Greenlandic), Uto-Aztecan languages
(Yaqui), Semitic languages (Hebrew) and non-Indo-European languages
(Hungarian).

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