Null Complement Anaphors as Definite Descriptions

Abstract

This paper develops the observation that, for many predicates, Null Complement Anaphora (NCA) is like anaphora with a descriptively empty definite description (Condoravdi & Gawron 1996, Gauker 2012). I consider how to distinguish this sort of NCA from pronouns theoretically, and then observe an unnoticed exception to the pattern. For verbs like "notice", NCA is neither like a definite description nor like a pronoun, raising a new puzzle of how to represent it