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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

Object drop and article drop in reduced written register

| NTNU Norwegian University of Science and Technology
This paper discusses object drop in English ‘reduced written register’ (RWR), such as recipes (Haegeman 1987a, b, Massam & Roberge 1989, Massam 1992) and diaries. Object drop differs from subject drop in RWR (Haegeman 1997, 2007, 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 (2003)’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.
Keywords: pro-drop, written English, telegraphic register, register variation, object drop, article drop
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
Published online: 26 January 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lv.14016.wei
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