On the Understood Object in English

Abstract

In English, there are many verbs that are transitive by nature but aresometimes used without an object. These have been calledobject-omission verbs. This paper classifies them into two types:indefinite object-omission verbs (e.g., eat, read, write, etc.) and definiteobject-omission verbs (e.g., know, shake, understand, etc.). Hankamer andSag (1976) divide anaphora into two types, depending on the availabilityof linguistic or situational contexts: deep anaphora and surface anaphora. This paper proposes that the understood objects of object-omission verbsinduce two different types of anaphora, corresponding to two types ofobject-omission verbs: inherent anaphora and contextual anaphora. Wefurther propose that inherent anaphora is lexical, while contextualanaphora is either deep- or surface-anaphoric in the sense of Hankamerand Sag.