Abstract
The chapter sets out the basic facts pertaining to optional complements of English verbs and adjectives. Such optional complements, when omitted, are often referred to as implicit arguments. The chapter rehearses the distributional facts pertaining to optional complements of English verbs and shows how analogous facts obtain for optional complements of English adjectives. In addition, it shows how to treat such words within a syntactic analysis susceptible of a model theoretic treatment faithful to speaker’s entailment judgements.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
Should the word strictly subcategorize for more than one sister constituent, the different constituents can be identified by adding further complement specifications enclosed within braces, the braced specification being separated by commas. For a complete presentation of the notation, see Gillon (2012) § 2.
- 3.
This informal statement does not take into account fully the complexity which arises from the fact that the subject noun phrase is plural.
- 4.
The complete model theoretic details are found in Gillon (2012) § 2.3.
- 5.
I thank Andrew Reisner for bringing this example to my attention.
- 6.
Of course, the subcategorization frames must be enriched so as to specify the choice of preposition.
References
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Acknowledgments
 This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC 410-2010-1254).
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Gillon, B. (2015). Optional Complements of English Verbs and Adjectives. In: de Almeida, R., Manouilidou, C. (eds) Cognitive Science Perspectives on Verb Representation and Processing. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-10112-5_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-10112-5_3
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