Typological hierarchies and object omission in Persian

Object omission construction is a valency-reduction process in which a transitive verb appears without its object and is used as an intransitive one. However, the addressee is able to understand the meaning of the objectless sentence. The considered type of object omission in this paper is context-independent, in which the reference of the omitted object is not mentioned in previous context and the context does not provide any clue to recover the deleted object. Among different factors which can affect object omission, in this research we attempt to determine the nature of the deleted object based on some important typological hierarchies such as animacy, referentiality, definiteness and number which can be used to determine the tendency of language in choosing the prototypical object in the sentence. It seems that an object is omissible when it has different features compared to the present object in the sentence. The findings prove this claim and reveal that the reference of the omitted object is located in the lower levels of the aforementioned typological hierarchies. Moreover, the findings indicate that an element such as 'number' which makes no difference in morpho-syntactic presentation of the direct object in the sentence has no effect on the possibility of object omission.