The Frequency of Indefinite Object Omission Among Prototypical Verbs and Their Synonyms

Pogorevc, Matija (author), Lipovšek, Frančiška (mentor)

The present thesis studies the relation between the prototypicality of transitive verbs and the frequency of indefinite object omission. Since any transitive verb can theoretically omit its object given the right context, the study includes both verbs with manner and result components. Verbs are grouped into semantic sets of synonyms and arranged in terms of frequency in the enTenTen 2021 corpus. The study finds no meaningful correlation between a verb’s prototypicality and the rate of object omission. Instead, a mixture of factors seems to allow for or motivate object omission, including habituality, the unimportance of the object’s exact identity or its high level of inferability and semantic properties of the verb; these factors do not seem to correlate with the verb’s prototypicality. Object recoverability of certain prototypical members of their respective semantic sets is either too low or the contexts wherein these verbs are used that could raise the inferability of their objects are very rare.

• Language: English
• Keywords: indefinite object omission, verb prototypicality, corpus analysis
• Work type: Master's thesis/paper
• Organization: FF - Faculty of Arts
• Year: 2025
• PID: 20.500.12556/RUL-168801
• COBISS.SI-ID: 234237699
• Publication date in RUL: 25.04.2025

Secondary language

• Language: Slovenian
• Title: Pogostost izpusta splošnega predmeta med prototipičnimi glagoli in njihovimi sinonimi

Abstract

Magistrsko delo obravnava povezavo med prototipičnostjo prehodnih glagolov in pogostostjo izpusta splošnega predmeta. Ker lahko teoretično vsak prehodni glagol izpusti predmet v pravem kontekstu, korpusna študija vključuje več vrst glagolov, med njimi tudi glagole, ki izražajo način izvršitve dejanja (»manner«) in glagole, ki izražajo nek učinek na predmetu (»result«). Glagoli so zbrani v pomenske skupine petih sinonimov in razvrščeni glede na pogostost rabe v korpusu enTenTen 2021. Analiza ne kaže korelacije med prototipičnostjo glagola in pogostostjo izpusta predmeta. Boljši razlogi za izpust so habitualnost, nepomembnost ali visoka predvidljivost predmeta in semantične lastnosti glagola. Predvidljivost predmeta pri nekaterih prototipičnih članih je prenizka ali pa so ti glagoli relativno zelo redko uporabljeni v kontekstih, kjer je predmet zadostno predvidljiv.

• Keywords: izpust splošnega predmeta, prototipičnost glagolov, korpusna analiza