Abstract
Which normally-transitive English verbs can omit their objects (I ate), and why? This paper explores three factors that have been 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 (Levin & Rapaport Hovav 2014; Martí 2015). To operationalize (iii), this paper leverages the assumption that a given verb may be more strongly associated with a routine in one community than another. Comparing writings across communities, this paper offers corpus and experimental evidence that verbs omit their objects more readily in the communities where they are more strongly associated with a routine. Object-omitting uses of verbs are analyzed, following other work, as intransitive aspectual activities describing an agent’s routine actions; so the hearer’s task is not to recover a missing object, but to recognize the routine described by the verb. More broadly, the paper explores how the meaning and syntactic potential of verbs are shaped by the practices of the people who use them.
Highlights
IntroductionIt 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
We find a fairly accurate set of sentences where transitive verbs are used with direct objects; and a set of sentences with no ‘dobj’ dependency which still contains more false positives than true positives for object omission
The experiment does identify a striking effect of routine: consistent with the Routine → Omission Hypothesis, a verb is judged to omit its object more when the speaker indicates that the verb is more strongly associated with a routine for them
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; Ruppenhofer 2004; Gillon 2012).
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