This paper sets out to find the defining characteristics of so-called expletive categories and consequences existence such has for Universal Grammar. Looking into different instantiations subjects impersonal pronouns, definite articles, negative markers plural in various natural languages, we reach following generalizations: (i) are deficient functional elements interpreted as introducing an id...

Several (and successfull) Information Extraction systems have recently replaced the core parsing components with shallow but more ecient recognizers. In this paper we argue that the absence of an underlying grammatical recog-nizer, given the complex nature of several (non-english) languages , is a strong limitation for text processing functionali-ties, like those an IE system needs. We propose ...