Implicit Arguments: Object deprofiling in the context of the inherently transitive verbs "build", "construct", and "create"

This dataset comprises results of corpus-driven contrastive analyses performed for the inherently transitive English verbs "build", "construct" and "create" with respect to object deprofiling. Sentences extracted from two large electronic corpora show that despite a certain degree of semantic overlap, these verbs differ in their disposition to leave their object argument implicit. Following the pertinent literature, a distinction is made between three basic types of null instantiation, namely indefinite, definite, and generic. The application of an innovative method allowed for the automatic detection of intransitive uses of the inherently causative verbs. Apart from sentences, the dataset also includes collocations as well as vector representations visualizing the verbs’ selectional preferences.