Implicit arguments: Object deprofiling in the context of the inherently transitive verb "produce"

This file contains 152 sentences from news articles in which the causative verb produce is used intransitively. The verb displays three types of null instantiation in the sense of Fillmore’s Frame Semantics: Indefinite Null Instantiation (INI), Definite Null Instantiation (DNI), and Generic Null Instantiation (GNI). If the direct object is indefinitely null-instantiated, it is "understood" without further information from the context in which the verb appears. Although it is not syntactically realized, it remains conceptually present. Indefinitely null-instantiated objects are inferable from frame information and abstractions over the verb’s selectional preferences. As far as DNI is concerned, a referent for the deprofiled object argument is available in the preceding discourse context. If the verb displays GNI, it adopts a generic or habitual reading. While DNI creates anaphoric relations, INI may create cataphoric relations if a referent for the locally unexpressed argument is introduced later in the discourse context. The sentences were automatically extracted from the Concretely Annotated English Gigaword by using the software tool Tgrep2. The Gigaword corpus contains 4.5 billion words from 10 million English newswire articles (1994 to 2010) and allows users to search for syntactic structures. Since Tgrep2 only searches one file per query, it was necessary to extend the search by using the programming language Python, which is capable of accessing the whole corpus (i.e. all 1,010 files). Irrelevant results like multiple occurrences of the same sentence, relative clauses, or sentences containing the deverbal noun produce were removed from the dataset. Null instantiation displayed by produce is distributed over three domains, namely economy, entertainment (film and music production), and sports.