Null objects in English and Spanish recipes

Abstract

Even though English and Spanish are languages which do not usually allow null objects (NOs) in the general case, this phenomenon is possible in some special registers of the languages. English and Spanish speakers omit the objects in the written discourse in informal contexts such as in Diaries, Note-taking writing or in the Short Message Service –SMS– (contexts that belong to the Reduced Written Register); and in formal contexts such as Recipes. Despite the fact that several papers have been published analysing the phenomenon of null objects in recipes in English, little attention has been paid to null objects in recipes in Spanish. In this paper, I will focus on the phenomenon of null objects, or object dropping, in Recipes in both English and Spanish, aiming to test whether the analyses provided for the phenomenon of null objects in recipes in English are applicable to the phenomenon of null objects in recipes in a romance language, such as Spanish, by comparing both; taking into account some particularities of the phenomenon that seem to be similar in both languages (specific interpretation of the null object, the licensing of NOs with transitive verbs or the phenomenon being a result of the presence of an empty category among others). Through this comparison, it can be seen that the different analyses provided to explain the phenomenon of null objects in recipes in English are not appropriate to explain the licensing of missing objects in recipes in Spanish due to certain particularities of the Spanish language. The licensing of empty operators (OP), the mechanism used to assign definite interpretations or the construction of sentences containing truncated elements in Spanish differ from English; leading to conclude that the phenomenon of null objects in recipes in Spanish cannot be analysed as the phenomenon in English regardless of the similarities of the phenomenon in both languages.