Between zero and nothing: Transitivity and noun incorporation in Somali Tosco, Mauro,, 28, 83-104 (2004), doi = https://doi.org/10.1075/sl.28.1.04tos, publicationName = John Benjamins, issn = 0378-4177, abstract= The article analyzes the expression of understood objects in Somali. There is no object pronoun of 3rd person in Somali; this gap is usually interpreted as a “full Ø”, which saturates the valency of a transitive verb and forces a reading with an anaphoric object. The article shows that this is empirically incorrect: in certain configurations, Somali transitive verbs admit either an anaphoric or a generic reading even in the absence of either an object NP or a non-null pronoun. In order to ensure a generic-object reading, Somali has further recourse to noun incorporation. The article explores the productivity of this strategy as a detopicalizing, backgrounding mechanism and argues that the overall generality of the anaphoric reading is the result of the obligatoriness of focus marking., language=, type=