An approach to zero categories in syntax

The paper examined one of the least explored issues of the Russian philology, namely a syntactic zero. One should accurately differentiate the syntactic zero from other positions being not substituted in the sentence, such as ellipse, incompleteness, etc. Actually, one could hardly find the papers having considered this issue, with proper description and comprehensive differentiation for syntactic zero’ instances. Experts carried multiple debates on what one should recognize for a zero, and nobody arranged zero instances into classification. The authors made a review of the papers of academic significance the linguists have produced, and specified zero categories for the Russian language, and have sorted out the main features typical of the syntactic zero. The authors assumed that the experts could sort out much more syntactic categories, for example, in considering the subject in the so-called single-constituent clauses (indefinite personal or generalized personal clauses, or impersonal ones). The authors tried, in order to escape overburdening of the presentation, to start with looking into the most fundamental and universally recognized zeros, in their opinion, namely a zero form of the copula and a zero of any verb of existence. The main principle of differentiating a syntactic zero means it being isomorphic to zero categories at other levels of language, because at any level of language the concept of zero is derived by tradition upon the set of elements drawn up in compliance with the principle of oppositions (i.e. paradigm).