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I received an email from a client who is a native English speaker. At the end of his message, he wrote, :If there are any follow-up questions we are happy to address."
This sounds weird to me. Shouldn't he say "we are happy to address them"? Is it a thing in modern English that we can drop the object after "address" in these cases?
Thanks for much for your help.
While technically not correct grammar
happy to address
is a common enough colloquialism that it wouldn't sound weird or unusual to a native speaker.
It's perfectly fine for casual conversation or email exchanges.
I must say that that example does seem to be quite jarring and weird to me (native speaker). It certainly sounds incorrect. A good way to phrase it would be:
If there are any follow-up questions, we would be happy to address them.
Or
We would be happy to address any follow up questions you have.
Or
We will now address any follow-up questions.
"Address", as a verb, is transitive. However, there are plenty of cases in everyday usage where the object of a transitive verb is implicit. I guess that could be the case here, but I find the example you give jarring. I would know what they meant, of course, but it reads like they got distracted and forgot to finish the sentence.
I'm a native British English speaker; the reaction of other dialect speakers may be different.
