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Part of
Free Variation in Grammar: Empirical and theoretical approaches
Edited by Kristin Kopf and Thilo Weber
[Studies in Language Companion Series 234] 2023
► pp. 99–164

Chapter 5
‘Optional’ direct objects: Free variation?

ORCID logo | Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf

While the existence of free variation is widely acknowledged in phonology, it has often been denied for lexicon and syntax. Syntactic variation, according to the consensus among many, is never truly free; apparent counterexamples are just cases of undetected complementary distribution. Among these phenomena suggesting free variation are optional objects in German, which can be and have been described as valency alternatives of individual verbs.

In this paper, linguistic units – phonemes as well as lexemes and syntactic configurations – are uniformly modelled as interpretation and production rules of different strengths, allowing for redundancies due to the licensing of the same structure on different linguistic levels. Introductory examples from phonology are extended to morphology and eventually to the aforementioned ‘optional’ direct objects. Based on a large acceptability rating study, it will be shown that most of the phenomena in question are neither cases of free variation nor of complementary distribution; instead, they are the result of partially equivalent distribution systematically arising from the conflict of rules of different degrees of specificity on different linguistic levels.

Keywords: valency, constructions, null instantiations, direct objects, free variation, complementary distribution, partially equivalent distribution, acceptability judgements
Article outline
  • 1.Human behaviour, flying saucers and the afterlife, or: Is there free variation in syntax?
  • 2.Modelling variation
    • 2.1Rules for allophones in free and complementary distribution
    • 2.2Polysemy, polymorphy and partially equivalent distribution
  • 3.Valency, constructions and optional complements
    • 3.1Verbs between polysemy and polymorphy
    • 3.2Optional direct objects
      • 3.2.1‘Topic drop’: PED, lexical rules vs template rules bound by FC
      • 3.2.2‘Lexical ellipses’: PED, lexical rules vs lexical rules bound by MC
      • 3.2.3‘DNI’ vs ‘INI’: PED, lexical rules vs lexical rules bound by MC vs directly assigned (argument structure template) rules (MC-bound)
      • 3.2.4Non-lexical DNI: PED (developing towards CD,) lexical rules vs sentence type rules (directly assigned)
  • 4.Empirical study: Acceptability rating experiments
    • 4.1Methods
    • 4.2Do activity templates license valency reductions?
      • 4.2.1Setting: Verbs and test templates
      • 4.2.2Results
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
  • Appendix
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 31 October 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.234.05sym
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