Why linguists believe in invisible words - the story of zeros

Do languages have unspoken meaningful nothings? Grammatical ghosts? Syntactically significant silences? Linguists sure seem to think so. They've been writing zeros in their grammars for years. What are these nulls? Where do they come from? Are they really there?

~ Briefly ~
My animation tells the story of linguistic zeros. We'll see the evidence of their existence I've been collecting in my folder, then meet their proponents and their critics. By the end we'll aim to find good reasons for avoiding and for proposing zeros, depending on the people, the context and the cultures involved.

~ Credits ~
Art, animation, narration and music by me. All other credits in sources document above.

[polifemo]

"sometimes its not a pizza with a null topping, its just bread" this is awesome

[papaquonis]

As a Dane, it's slightly confusing suddenly having to think of Ø as a zero.

[nahometesfay]

This is one of the [clearly omitted but relevant superlative] linguistic videos of all time.

[vincelamb]

A linguistic ghost story in time for Halloween! A trick and a treat!

[MustafaAlmosawi]

I normally thoroughly enjoy your videos but this one went largely over my head. I think I understood the general outline of the idea of a linguistic zero because certain linguists coming from a specific background were trying to fit another language into their preconceived framework - but a few more concrete examples would have grounded it for me. Your voice over and prose were elegant as always!

[BRUXXUS]

This feels like a video created exclusively for linguists. I had almost no idea what I was watching or listening to the whole time.
That said, it was still beautifully done... I think?

[sean..L]

Your videos are usually pretty esoteric but this goes above and beyond.

[darkkestrel]

NATIVLANG IS BACK!!!

on a side note Saussure isn't from l'Héxagone, he was Swiss, and as someone from his hometown my heart just broke :((( what if someday I get called French :(((

[bobdowling]

This really would have benefited from more examples of (alleged) zeros in languages.

[jonasarnesen]

In Ainu when you leave the prefix of a word/verb/noun away you have he/she/it
クク I drink
ク (he) drinks
クエ→ケ I eat
エ (he) eats

Even in a dictionary it is stated as ゼロ which means zero.

[baykkus]

One of the things I love/hate the most about linguistics is how even seemingly strictly theoretical and abstract concepts, such as a null word/morpheme, end up having cultural and social implications that cannot be glossed over.

[jopeteus]

Closely related feature about Finnish:
In spoken language, in some situations, you can drop the word "no" and it can still be understood that the sentence is negative.
Minä tiedän = I know
Minä en tiedä = I don't know
Minä en tiedä mitään = I don't know anything
Minä mitään tiedä = I (don't) know anything

This grammatical mood is called "Aggressive mood".
There is even wikipedia article about it

[reinatheomni-panda]

Never been a fan of zeros in analysis except where you can clearly show that, for example, it fills a paradigm or some feature is being meaningfully marked by a deletion, like in disfixing situations when книга goes to книг in Russian, for instance. Where it starts to get really hazy to me is linguists sticking zeros on to mark things that you could also analyze as unmarked. Like in Lakota, I personally don't take it that verbs with no pronominal affixes on them are "zero-marked" for 3rd person singular, rather that the base unmarked form is heard as such and then non-3s forms are marked, i.e. "máni" (he/she/they(s)/it walked) is not ma-Ø-ni with the Ø marking 3s. That might be useful as a way of showing where to put the affix in, say, "mawáni" (I walked), but I don't think there's actually a zero there, although maybe I'm wrong, idk. The "meaningless zeros" Jakobson talks about seem particularly problematic, as how do you even show they exist apart from, as he does, an appeal to "elegance". The eurocentrism criticism is particularly sharp as well. Can you imagine if roles were reversed and European languages were being analyzed by speakers of non-European languages as being "zero-marked" for things that the non-European languages marked? What if a Mayan-speaker analyzed the English noun "singer" as having potentially TWO (OR MORE) unspoken -Ø morphemes, depending on who it's referring to, that mark the singer's gender, based on the existing English "actor"-"actress" pair and paralleling that with the Mayan-speakers' native language marking both female and male on such nouns with "ix-" and "aj-" respectively?

[Conighttonight]

I wasn't smart enough to keep up with this video! Editing absolutely on point like usual though!

[NativLang]

What goes unsaid, unpaused but not unmeant?




Also, any beloved zeros to add to my folder?

[ZipplyZane]

I was always under the impression that nulls were always comparative. The linguist would obviously compare another language with their own, and their own with other languages.

Hence null copula. It's saying that some languages require some sort of linking word, and some don't. That's a comparison.

[jaredlash]

I appreciate how well this was done and the effort put into writing the script and making the animation. That said, I found it to be very difficult to follow in the rather poetic form in which it was written and spoken.

[notoriouswhitemoth]

...I for one would appreciate a followup video explaining what this one is talking about?

[weckar]

This video could really do with getting to a point. Having finished it, I feel I do not understand the concept any more than when I started; as to what exactly the invisible words are.

[popularmisconception]

I think it is a matter of Occam's razor. If the theory is simpler and more correct with zero morphemes, it is useful to have them. I once coded a language processing tool and since my language has fusional inflection with a lot of root vowel and consonant changes, such as umlauts, shortenings, prolongations, several kinds of palatalizations, etc., it was easier to represent inflectional modification patterns with a lot of zero-umlauts and zero-palatalizations, if there was no root change and materialize them when there was a change (which was usually coincident with zero ending) if you know what I mean. Zeros made things more regular. The funny thing is, you could have a long zero (which makes the vowel long), umlaut zero (which changes the vowel to a diphtong or a sister vowel), regular zero (just do nothing to the vowel), short zero (shorten the vowel) and null zero (leave out the vowel).