Abstract
Issues regarding interpretations and constraints of implicit objects in Chinese furnish intriguing topics for in-depth probe. On the premise of sharing the same cognitive and background knowledge (Fillmore & Atkins 1992), speakers and hearers can construe missing arguments in overt syntactic levels in terms of two cognitive mechanisms, viz., semantic predictability and recoverability. The distribution of implicit objects can be interpreted on the basis of three conditions: (a) world knowledge (e.g., cognitive frame), (b) information structure (e.g., information focus), and (c) construction effect (e.g., semantic coercion). Based on the theoretical proposals of Construction Grammar (Goldberg 1995; Jackendoff 2002) and verbal property (Goldberg 2005; Mittwoch 2005), this study explores the semantic interpretations and constraints of implicit objects in conjunction with kinds of constructions.