The Null Instantiation of the Object. A Phenomenon at the Syntax-Semantics-Pragmatics Interface

This book explores the relationship between verbs and their arguments, a widely debated topic in linguistics, and it concentrates on the phenomenon of the so-called “null instantiation of the object”, the property of some transitive verbs to leave their direct object unspecified. Research on the topic, gaining support from a revived interest in multiple argument verbs, has been frequently biased towards a particular research perspective, and null objects have been usually analysed in exclusively syntactic or semantic terms. The present work, on the contrary, assumes that such a phenomenon results from the interplay of syntactic, semantic and pragmatic properties of utterances and of verbs, and can be adequately treated only by taking into account all these three dimensions.The first two chapters survey leading theories about pragmatics, lexical semantics and conceptualization. Chapter 3 reviews treatment of null objects within different research framework, outlining a classification. The final chapter presents a case study carried out on the verb see.