---------------------------------------------- Comments * As an interesting note, when the following noun has been made definite but The suspense! I searched for quite some time on this subject, and only encountered papers covering that which I already learned; that Arabic has rather systematic subject pro-drop and object incorporation as pronouns, but I found nothing concerning the possibility for the type of Discourse related object drop we're interested in. We're interested in the systematic kind too :-) As far as I can tell, subject prodrop is allowed with definite instantiation, and object prodrop is not allowed; it must be made up with pronoun incorporation (where the COG-ST is made explicit by the pronoun). If you have access to a native (or near-native) speaker, I'd be interested to know how they translate: -- Are you hungry? -- No, I've already eaten. -- What do you do in your spare time? -- I read. ...this latter case seems to be constrained to dropping the subject for activ-or-more. Furthermore, this seems to happen for all verbs, so I added OPT-CS activ-or-more to the verb-lex's SUBJ constraints. The current implementation of basic-head-opt-subj-phrase doesn't actually reference OPT-CS in the way that basic-head-opt-comp-phrase does. It's rather brazenly stamping [ COG-ST in-foc ] on the erstwhile subject. I think you're right that I should allow for cross-linguistic variation here, and even if I don't, [ COG-ST in-foc ] is too strong. Broken: I haven't investigated thoroughly, but it seems when I try incorporating both the direct and indirect object ?? ** Something I still haven't figured out, however, is when generating I get extra parses which seem to take definiteness and case as optional on adjectives, but not nouns. Provide examples when you make comments like this so I can take a look... adverb-lex := basic-adverb-lex & intersective-mod-lex & [ SYNSEM [ LOCAL [ CAT [ HEAD.MOD < [ LOCAL.CAT.HEAD verb ] >, VAL [ SPR < >, SUBJ < >, COMPS < >, SPEC < > ], POSTHEAD + ] ] ] ]. This is overgenerating, since you're allowing it to attach to any verbal constituent.