Optionally transitive verbs, whose Patient participant is semantically obligatory but syntactically optional (e.g., to eat, to drink, to write), deviate from the transitive prototype defined by Hopper and Thompson (1980). Following Fillmore (1986), unexpressed objects may be either indefinite (referring to prototypical Patients of a verb, whose actual entity is unknown or irrelevant) or definite (with a referent available in the immediate intra- or extra-linguistic context). This thesis centered on indefinite null objects, which the literature argues to be a gradient, non-categorical phenomenon possible with virtually any transitive verb (in different degrees depending on the verb semantics), favored or hindered by several semantic, aspectual, pragmatic, and discourse factors. In particular, the probabilistic model of the grammaticality of indefinite null objects hereby discussed takes into account a continuous factor (semantic selectivity, as a proxy to object recoverability) and four binary factors (telicity, perfectivity, iterativity, and manner specification). This work was inspired by Medina (2007), who modeled the effect of three predictors (semantic selectivity, telicity, and perfectivity) on the grammaticality of indefinite null objects (as gauged via Likert-scale acceptability judgments elicited from native speakers of English) within the framework of Stochastic Optimality Theory.

In: Metodi e prospettive della ricerca linguistica. Ed. by Chiara Meluzzi and Nicholas Nese. Consonanze. Milano: Ledizioni.

Our paper offers a computational model of the semantic recoverability of verb arguments, tested in particular on direct objects and …

Modeling the gradient grammaticality of the indefinite object drop construction in Italian using five predictors in a Stochastic Optimality Theoretic model