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Article published In: Register Variation and Syntactic Theory
Edited by Diane Massam and Tim Stowell
[Linguistic Variation 17:2] 2017
► pp. 157–185

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Object drop and article drop in reduced written register

 | NTNU Norwegian University of Science and Technology
Published online: 26 January 2018
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https://doi.org/10.1075/lv.14016.wei
Abstract
This paper discusses object drop in English ‘reduced written register’ (RWR), such as recipes (Haegeman, Liliane. 1987a. Complement ellipsis in English: or how to cook without objects. In Anne-Marie Simon-Vandenbergen (ed.), Studies in Honour of René Derolez, 248–261. Ghent: Seminarie voor Engelse en Oud-Germaanse Taalkunde R.U.G.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar, . 1987b. Register variation in English: some theoretical implications. Journal of English Linguistics 201. 230–48. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar, Massam, Diane & Yves Roberge. 1989. Recipe context null objects in English. Linguistic Inquiry 20(1). 134–9.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar, Massam, Diane. 1992. Null objects and non-thematic subjects. Journal of Linguistics 281. 115–37. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar) and diaries. Object drop differs from subject drop in RWR (. 1997. Register variation, truncation, and subject omission in English and in French. English Language and Linguistics 1(2). 233–70. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar, . 2007. Subject omission in present-day written English: On the theoretical relevance of peripheral data. Rivista di grammatica generativa 321. 91–124.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar, this issue); dropped subjects can be of any person and can be expletives, while dropped objects can be third person only and cannot be expletives. I propose that object drop in RWR is dependent on article drop. I analyze null articles in RWR as the presence of a phonologically null determiner with the semantics of a choice function. To analyze object drop, I adopt Tomioka, Satoshi. 2003. The semantics of Japanese null pronouns and its cross-linguistic implications. In Kerstin Schwabe & Susanne Winkler (eds.), The interfaces: deriving and interpreting omitted structures, 321–39. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar’s analysis for Japanese null pronouns, in which a null determiner, combined with NP ellipsis, allows a constituent with pronominal-like semantics to go wholly unpronounced. I argue that a similar process is at work in English RWR, and argue that this analysis allows us to understand the person and expletive restrictions.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Object drop: distribution and explananda
  • 3.Previous analyses
    • 3.1Haegeman: topic drop
    • 3.2Massam: null objects and middles
    • 3.3Summary
  • 4.Article drop in RWR
    • 4.1Parallels between article drop and object drop
    • 4.2The scope behavior of article-less DPs
    • 4.3The null article in RWR: a choice-functional analysis
  • 5.Extending article drop to object drop
    • 5.1Tomioka: article drop and pronoun drop
    • 5.2The internal structure of a pronoun
    • 5.3The restriction to third person
    • 5.4The failure to drop expletives
    • 5.5Indefinite object drop
    • 5.6Summary
  • 6.Remaining issues
    • 6.1Subject-object asymmetries
    • 6.2Which objects can drop?
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
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