English Relational Words, Context Sensitivity and Implicit Arguments

Let us call such words relational words and let us, following linguistic custom, call the unexpressed relata implicit arguments. The phenomenon, under various names, has been the object of study since the inception of generative linguistics. Building on the observations of Charles Fillmore (1986), Barbara Partee (1989), David Dowty (1982), Kent Bach (1994) and others, I shall show that implicit arguments are associated with a large number of words from each of the major lexical classes. Second, I shall establish that these implicit arguments, aside from the ones sometimes known as indefinite implicit arguments, are all context sensitive in the same way in which words acknowledged universally to be context sensitive, such as the demonstrative