empty (adj.)

A term used in some GRAMMATICAL descriptions to refer to a meaningless ELEMENT introduced into a structure to ensure its GRAMMATICALITY. There is an empty use of it, for example, in such sentences as it’s raining, and EXISTENTIAL there is sometimes regarded in this way (e.g. there are mice in the larder). Such elements have also been called PROP words, or DUMMY elements. In GENERATIVE grammar, empty elements (empty nodes) are displayed in phrase-markers as DELTAS filled by dummies or empty categories. Empty categories include PRO, PRO, and TRACE (in GOVERNMENT-BINDING THEORY) and the SLASH categories of GENERALIZED PHRASE-STRUCTURE GRAMMAR.

The term is also sometimes used in the grammatical CLASSIFICATION of WORDS to refer to one of two postulated major word-classes in LANGUAGE, the other being FULL. Empty words are said to be words which have no LEXICAL MEANING, and whose function is solely to express grammatical relationships, e.g. to, the, in, of. The distinction has been criticized, on the grounds that there are degrees of meaning in most grammatical words, few (if any) being really devoid of CONTENT. The term is still used, however – though not as widely as some other terms (such as GRAMMATICAL word, FUNCTION WORD).

A term used in MORPHOLOGY, in the phrase empty morph, to refer to a FORMAL FEATURE in a word which cannot be allocated to any MORPHEME. A well-discussed example in English is the word children, where a possible analysis is into ROOT child and plural SUFFIX -en (cf. oxen); the residual /r/ left by this analysis is then seen as an empty morph without which the word would not be exhaustively analyzed at the morphemic LEVEL.