Abstract
Which normally transitive verbs can omit their objects in English (I ate), and why? This article explores three factors suggested to facilitate object omission: (i) how strongly a verb selects its object (Resnik 1993); (ii) a verb's frequency (Goldberg 2005); (iii) the extent to which the verb is associated with a routine – a recognized, conventional series of actions within a community (Lambrecht & Lemoine 2005; Ruppenhofer & Michaelis 2010; Levin & Rapaport Hovav 2014; Martí 2010, 2015). To operationalize (iii), this article compares the writings of different communities to offer corpus and experimental evidence that verbs omit their objects more readily in the communities in which they are more strongly associated with a routine. More broadly, the article explores how the meaning and syntactic potential of verbs are shaped by the practices of the people who use them.
Highlights
It is a longstanding question in lexical semantics which normally transitive verbs in English can omit their objects to describe an event with an unexpressed theme, which cannot, and why
Object omission has attracted decades of interest because it requires us to disentangle syntax, word meaning, discourse and world knowledge
A corpus study comparing specialty to generalist subreddits finds evidence consistent with the claim that verbs omit their objects more often in the communities where they are more strongly associated with a routine – illustrating the value of natural language processing tools and social media data for studying linguistic theory and grammatical variation (e.g. Bamman et al 2014; Acton & Potts 2014; Futrell et al 2015)
Summary
It is a longstanding question in lexical semantics which normally transitive verbs in English can omit their objects to describe an event with an unexpressed theme, which cannot, and why. Even near-synonyms differ in how natural they sound with their objects omitted (1) (Fillmore 1986; Rice 1988; Mittwoch 2005; Gillon 2012), making it difficult to explain omission in terms of meaning, and leading some researchers to characterize this phenomenon as partly or fully arbitrary (Fillmore 1986; Jackendoff 2002; Ruppenhofer 2004; Gillon 2012; Ruppenhofer & Michaelis 2014).(1) (a) I ate__vs. ?I devoured__ (b) I drank__vs. ?I guzzled__ (c) I wrote__vs. ?I penned__ (d) I raked__vs. ?I bagged__. The contrasts in (1) are argued to arise when one half of the minimal pair is more strongly associated with a routine than the other
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