Syntactic function vt[oN]
transitive verb with a lexically determined or predictable omitted object
The typically lexically determinate but omitted object is a general object like "things; the situation". But there are not so few cases where what is omitted is more specific, like "a document" or "a person" etc.. Moreover, what is lexically determinate may be only one of the participants in the situation that the verb refers to. One might have gone into much more detail about such problems of implicit valency, but this would lead too far into complex analytic problems that are more philosophical than linguistic in nature. For example in the English "he drinks" we have a verb of which the object is understood lexically to be "alcohol". In "he is eating" the object that is lexically understood is "some kind of food". We must try to identify the Chinese verbs that work like this and try to distinguish them carefully from intransitive verbs. In classical Chinese we have words that work like English "eat", but not like the idiomatic English "drink".
Usage
- Lexical entries:
- Found 1973 attributions