摘要：The aim of this paper is to give an account of object omission in English within the context of the theory of Functional Grammar (FG). In the first section we discuss the factors that, in one way or another, are relevant to understanding the complex nature of this grammatical phenomenon. In so doing, we review the main aspects of some of the analyses that can be found in the literature. Drawing most notably upon Fillmore (1986), section 3 introduces a crucial distinction between lexical and discoursive object omission. We formulate a number of hypotheses on the properties of object omission, which are then tested in the light of corpus data. In sections 4 and 5 we study the implications of our findings for FG. In particular, we claim that the formal equipment of the theory is not able to capture the full complexity of the problem, and, in this vein, we suggest that the new architecture of FG, Hengeveld’s (fc.) Functional Discourse Grammar, together with the formalism introduced in García Velasco & Hengeveld (fc), might be better suited to accounting for the facts presented.
