Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-94d59 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-29T13:21:40.325Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Null objects in English recipes

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

Christopher Culy
Affiliation:
The University of Iowa

Abstract

Recipes exhibit a phenomenon that does not exist in other varieties that are commonaly studied (e.g., narrative, sentences in isolation, conversational discourse, etc.)—namely, zero anaphors as direct objects, as in Beat [ø] until stiff. The two goals of this article are to examine this phenomenon in both contemporary recipes and across time and to explore its consequences for linguistic theroy. It is found that stylistic, semantic, and discourse factors are the most important in the phenomenon, with syntax and morphology playing relatively minor roles. Furthermore, these zero anaphors pattern like overt pronouns and have in fact replaced overt pronouns over time. A preliminary model of register variation and its consequences for the synactic analysis of recipes are also presented.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1996

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Betty Crocker's cookbook. (1969). (13th printing, 1979). New York: Bantam.Google Scholar
Bresnan, Joan. (1982). Controal and complementation. In Bresnan, Joan (ed.), The mental representation of grammatical relations. Cambridge, MA: MIT press. 282390.Google Scholar
Brown, Cheryl. (1983). Topic continuity in written English narrative. In Givón, (1983b). 313341.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bullock, Helen. (1966). (14th printing, 1983). The Williamsburg art of cookery or accomplish'd gentlewoman's companion: Being a collection of upwards of five hundred of the most ancient & approv'd recipes in Virginia. Richmond, VA: Dietz.Google Scholar
Cunningham, Marion. (1992). The Fannie Farmer baking book. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.Google Scholar
Dowty, David R. (1979). Word meaning and Montague grammar. Boston: D. Reidel.Google Scholar
Ferguson, Charles A. (1982). Simplified registers and linguistic theory. In Obler, Loraine K. & Menn, Lise (eds.), Exceptional language and linguistics. New York: Academic. 4966.Google Scholar
Ferguson, Charles A. (1983). Sports announcer talk: Syntactic aspects of register variation. Language in Society 12:153172.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fillmore, Charles J. (1986). Pragmatically controlled zero anaphora. In Nikiforidou, Vassiliki et al. (eds.), Proceedings of the Twelfth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society. Berkeley, CA: Berkeley Linguistic Society. 95107.Google Scholar
Fitzpatrick, Eileen, Bachenko, John, & Hindle, Don. (1986). The status of telegraphic sublanguages. In Grishman, & Kittredge, (1986). 3951.Google Scholar
Fleming, Ian. (1958). Doctor No. New York: Macmillan.Google Scholar
Fliess, Walter, & Fliess, Jenny. (1964). Modern vegetarian cookery. Harmondsworth: Penguin.Google Scholar
Givón, Talmy. (1983a). Topic continuity in discourse: An introduction. In Givón, (1983b). 141.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Givón, Talmy. (1983b). Topic continuity in discourse: A quantitative cross-language study. Philadelphia: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Givón, Talmy. (1983c). Topic continuity in spoken English. In Givón, (1983b). 343363.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Grishman, Ralph, & Kittredge, Richard. (1986). Analyzing language in restricted domains: Sublanguage description and processing. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Grosz, Barbara, Joshi, Aravind K., & Weinstein, Scott. (1995). Centering: A framework for modeling the local coherence of discourse. Computational Linguistics 21:203225.Google Scholar
Haegeman, Liliane. (1987). Register variation in Engligh: Some theoretical observations. Journal of English Linguistics 20:230248.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Harris, Zellig. (1968). Mathematical structures of language. New York: John Wiley & Sons.Google Scholar
Hazlitt, W. Carew. (1902). Old cookery books and ancient cuisine. London: Elliot Stock.Google Scholar
Hieatt, Constance B., & Butler, sharon (1976). Pleyn delit, medieval cookery for modern cooks. Toronto: University of Toronto press.Google Scholar
Huang, C.-T. James. (1984). On the distribution and reference of empty pronouns. Linguistic Inquiry 15:531574.Google Scholar
Janda, Richard D. (1985). Note-taking English as a simplified register. Discourse Processes 8:437454.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kameyama, Megumi. (1985). Zero anaphora: The case of Japanese Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford University.Google Scholar
Kameyama, Megumi. (1986). A property-sharing constraint in centering. Proceedings of the Association for Computational Linguistics 1986:200206.Google Scholar
Kittredge, Richard. (1982). Variation and homogeneity of sublanguages. In Kittredge, & Lehrberger, (1982). 107137Google Scholar
Kittredge, Richard, & Lehrberger, John. (1982). Sublanguage: Studies of language in restricted semantic domains. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Labov, William. (1973). Where do grammars stop? In Shuy, Roger W. (ed.), Report of the Twenty-Third Annual Round Table Meeting on Linguistics and Language Studies, Washington, DC: Georgetown University press. 4388.Google Scholar
Lappé, Frances Moore. (1982) Diet for a small planet (10th anniversary trade edition ). New York: Ballantine.Google Scholar
Lehrberger, John. (1982). Automatic translation and the concept of sublanguage. In Kittredge, & Lehrberger, (1982). 81106.Google Scholar
Lehrberger, John. (1986). Sublanguage analysis. In Grishman, & Kittredge, (1986). 1938.Google Scholar
Li, Charles N., & Thompson, Sandra A. (1979). Third-person pronouns and zero-anaphora in Chinese discourse. In Givón, T. (ed.), Syntax and semantics 12: Discourse and syntax. New York: Academic. 311335.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lira, Soange de Azambuja. (1982). Nominal, pronominal, and zero subject in Brazilian portuguese, Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania.Google Scholar
Massam, Diane, & Roberge, Yves. (1989). Recipe context null objects in English. Linguistic Inquiry 20:134139.Google Scholar
Mohanan, K. P. (1983). Functional and anaphoric control. Linguistic Inquiry 14:641674.Google Scholar
Naro, Anthony J. (1981). Morphological constraints on subject selection. In Sankoff, D. & Cedergren, H. J. (eds.), Variation omnibus. Edmonton: Linguistic Research. 351357.Google Scholar
Ohlander, Urban. (1943). Omission of the object in English. Studia Neophilologica 16:105127.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Parkinson, Dilworth B. (1986, 10). Constraints on the presence/absence of “optional” subject pronouns in Egyptian Arabic. Paper presented at NWAVE-XV,Stanford University.Google Scholar
Pollard, Carl, & Sag, Ivan A. (1994). Head-driven phrase structure grammar. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Rizzi, Luigi. (1986). Null objects in Italian and the theory of pro. Linguistic Inquiry 17:501557.Google Scholar
Rombauer, Irma S., & Becker, Marion Rambauer. (1975). Joy of cooking. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill.Google Scholar
Sadock, Jerrold M. (1974). Read at your own risk: Syntactic and semantic horrors you can find in your medicine chest. In LaGaly, Michael W., Fox, Robert A., & Bruck, Anthony (eds.), Papers from the Tenth Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society. Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society. 599607.Google Scholar
Scott, Anna B. (1921). Mrs. Scott's North American seasonal cookbook. Philadelphia: John C. Winston.Google Scholar
Silva, Vera Lúcia Paredes. (1993). Subject omission and functional compensation: Evidence from Brazilian Portuguese. Language Variation and Change 5:3549.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Silva-Corvalán, Carmen. (1982). Subject expression and placement in Mexican-American Spanish. In Amastae, J. & Elias-Olivares, L. (eds.), Spanish in the United States: Sociolinguistic aspects. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 93120.Google Scholar
Straumann, Heinrich. (1935). Newspaper headlines: A study in linguistic method. London: George Allen & Unwin.Google Scholar
Sunset, . (1982). Easy basics or good cooking. Menlo Park, CA: Lane.Google Scholar
Tyree, Marion Cabell (ed.). (1879). Housekeeping in Old Virginia. Louisville, KY: John P. Morton and Company. (Reprinted in 1965 by Favorite Recipes. Louisville, KY).Google Scholar
Visser, Frederick Theodore. (1963). An historical syntax of the English language Vol. 1. Leiden: Brill.Google Scholar
Walker, Marilyn, Cote, Sharon, & Iida, Masayo. (1994). Japanese discourse and the process of centering. Computational Linguistics 20:193231.Google Scholar
Zwicky, Arnold M. (1990). Empty NPs in English and government in unexpected places. In Edmondson, J. A., Feagin, Crawford, & Mühlhäusler, P. (eds.), Development and diversity: Language variation across time and space. A festschrift for Charles-James N. Bailey. Dallas: Summer Institute of Linguistics. 255263.Google Scholar
Zwicky, Arnold M., & Zwicky, Ann D. (1982). Register as a dimension of linguistic variation. In Kittredge, & Lehrberger, (1982). 213218.Google Scholar