Null complement anaphora (NCA) is a phenomenon where a predicate’s complement is elided. Traditionally, NCA has been taken to be deep anaphora whose interpretation make reference to objects in a discourse or other semantic model, not to syntactic structures as surface anaphora does. It has also been noted that there is no uniform semantic class of verbs that license NCA. This paper investigates the real-life uses of NCA with the corpus COCA (Corpus of Contemporary American English), focusing on the authentic uses of a total of 98 NCA-licensing predicates discussed in the previous literature. We then discuss theoretical implications of the corpus data.
1. Introduction
2. Basic Properties
3. Corpus and Data Collection
4. Corpus Findings and Discussion
5. Conclusion