Just 'carry' for 'carry weapons' and just 'lift' instead of 'lift weights'. What linguistic phenomenon is it?

Question

There are English verbs that can be used without an object while meaning a certain object. E.g.

• Carry = carry weapons
• Lift = lift weights
• Use = use drugs
• Possibly, ‘investigate’ (an incident, a crime, a statement) as well.

Some examples I saw:

California may issue permits to carry if a person meets the requirements.

For years I lifted just because I loved to lift.

The FBI was called in to investigate.

This is what I’m wondering:

1. Any more examples that spring to your mind?
2. Is there a word or a term in Linguistics for this sort of phenomenon?

I found and read a few articles about null objects / context null objects. They mention examples like ‘Beat [ø] until stiff’. Are my examples the same phenomenon?

Thank you.

Answer 1

The "linguistic phenomenon" is know ambitransitive verbs.

These verbs, and there are many of them, may appear with or without an object but, can always have an object assumed.

e.g.

He ate

He ate a meal/apple/whole pig.

More simply, "something or someone" can be added after the verb.

In the examples you give, of course, the context implies the object, whereas normally, e.g. He ate, we do not know what he ate but he ate something.

Carry = carry weapons - context Police, politicians, concern over guns.

Lift = lift weights - context restricted to people who lift weights.

Use = use drugs - context police and drugs users.

It does this by dint of the repetitive and constant use in that context.

Answer 2

Visser, in An historical syntax of the English language [§152: Transitive Verbs used Absolutely] has

• [M]any verbs that are usually construed with an object are often used without this object when it may be inferred [a] from the situation … or [b] from the [lexical] context …. Occasionally the [candidate] object is so vague that the verb is virtually an intransitive one, especially in those combinations where it has acquired a [c] [novel sense].

• [a] 'Drink, John, drink!'

• [b] 'Shall I help you to carry the tray?' ... 'No, I can manage.'

• [c1] 'The door gives onto the garden.'

• [c2] 'How do you do!'

[adjusted slightly]

Of course, one man's 'easily inferrable from the global/lexical context' is another man's headache. 'You must eat!' is far more widely understood than 'He lifted in his earlier years'.

Answer 3

These verbs and nouns are said to collocate. In other words, be found at the same "location".

Relevant Wikipedia entry

Collocations are partly or fully fixed expressions that become established through repeated context-dependent use. Such terms as 'crystal clear', 'middle management', 'nuclear family', and 'cosmetic surgery' are examples of collocated pairs of words.

Collocations can be in a syntactic relation (such as verb–object: 'make' and 'decision'), lexical relation (such as antonymy), or they can be in no linguistically defined relation. Knowledge of collocations is vital for the competent use of a language: a grammatically correct sentence will stand out as awkward if collocational preferences are violated. This makes collocation an interesting area for language teaching.

Corpus linguists specify a key word in context (KWIC) and identify the words immediately surrounding them. This gives an idea of the way words are used.

The processing of collocations involves a number of parameters, the most important of which is the measure of association, which evaluates whether the co-occurrence is purely by chance or statistically significant. Due to the non-random nature of language, most collocations are classed as significant, and the association scores are simply used to rank the results. Commonly used measures of association include mutual information, t scores, and log-likelihood.[2][3]

collocation

[bolding mine]

Examples:

• make a decision [ok], do a decision [buzzer]
• be [some age"ten-years old] [ok], have some age [buzzer: have ten years]

When an object is missing in a verb+object collocation, it is because the writer has decided that the culture will approve it and recognize it. In "carry weapons", readers will fill it in in their minds.