Book Proposal: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives on Implicit Arguments

Editor: Chris Collins

The purpose of this volume is to promote cross-disciplinary research on the topic of implicit arguments. Potential contributors are encouraged to contact me at cc116@nyu.edu.

An implicit argument is an argument of a predicate that is not expressed (e.g., in writing, in speech, or in signing). Consider the passive sentence: ‘The book was written quickly and at great expense.’ In this sentence, there is an understood agent of writing that is not expressed anywhere in the sentence. Such an understood agent is called an ‘implicit argument’. Implicit arguments are found in many other constructions in English as well, such as evaluative adjectives, middles and nominalizations.

Implicit arguments are important theoretically since they raise sharp questions about the relationship between meaning and form. There seems to be a mismatch between the form of the sentence and how it is interpreted, bringing up the following questions: How is information about the implicit argument represented linguistically? How is the interpretation of the implicit argument recovered by the addressee? How could a computer be programmed to understand implicit arguments? How do children acquire implicit arguments? How does the brain process implicit arguments?

This book gathers together contributions from experts in various fields, including philosophers, computational linguists, corpus linguists, syntacticians (of various frameworks), semanticists, typologists, child language researchers, psycholinguists, neurolinguists and applied linguists. The book also aims at increasing cross-linguistic research on implicit arguments.