Null-Headed Nominals in German and English
John Nerbonne and Tony Mullen 
Alfa-Informatica, University of Groningen     

In this paper we argue that certain nominal phrase constructions in
German and English are best considered as having empty lexical heads.
We propose a feature LP, which gives the status of the left periphery
of a nominal tree structure as one of three values, EMPTY, FULL or
ONE.  A number of simple language-specific rules govern the
combination of signs in terms of their LP values. For example,
determiners such as `none' or `mine' are restricted to combining with
N' constituents whose left periphery is empty [LP EMPTY] while `no'
and `my' require [LP FULL].  The feature provides a simple general
explanation of a number of related phenomena wherein determiners or
adjectives appear to "carry the weight" of DPs, including a variety
of German DP constructions, certain possessive constructions in both
English and German, and generics.  The broad descriptive power of this
feature argues that it is not an ad hoc solution.  In order to justify
it further, we investigate alternate explanations for the same
phenomena, without using the LP feature, and argue that these
approaches introduce unnecessary ambiguity and other complications.