Agenda
Teodora Radeva-Bork (Universität Potsdam)
Title: Omitting objects across languages and populations
Abstract: This talk discusses object omission in a crosslinguistic context with a special emphasis on Romance and Slavic from the perspectives of both adult and child grammar. I start by looking at some notorious cases of (optional) transitivity in verbs such as read, wash or dry in (1) and water in (2). The latter is grammatical with a null object in Russian and Polish but ungrammatical in the same condition in Bulgarian, German and English.
I revise the contrast between purely lexical and syntactic approaches to object omission with a special emphasis on the syntactic transitivity approach by Cummins & Roberge (2005) that assumes an obligatory representation of null objects in the syntactic structure.
The complete abstract can be found here.