The thesis studies the indefinite object deletion phenomena within the group of English and Slovene verbs with the semantic component ‘giving out information that affects the patient’. The corpus analysis and the review of dictionary entries examine the frequency and characteristics of the phenomena and its representation in monolingual dictionaries. Contemporary linguistic research draws a distinction between grammatically acceptable intransitive use of verbs and discourse-conditioned object omission. Intransitive behaviour is attributed to the so-called pseudo-intransitive verbs of activity, such as jesti/eat, brati/read, but not to telic verbs like navdušiti/impress or razočarati/disappoint. While linguists mention certain verbs of interest in their discussions of the indefinite object deletion (e.g. svariti/warn, kritizirati/criticise), it remains unclear whether these verbs are pseudo-intransitive verbs or object-deleting verbs that omit their object only in a specific context, such as habitual sentences. Dictionaries of both English and Slovene inconsistently and incorrectly present available valency patterns, which is problematic not only for native speakers but also for language learners.
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