Nonreferential Complements, Nominalizations, and Derived Objects

I will argue that certain complements in philosophically significant constructions, especially predicative and clausal complements and intensional NPs, should not be analysed as providing an argument for a relation expressed by the verb, but rather as forming a complex predicate together with the verb. Apparent evidence for the traditional relational analyses, namely the possibility of replacing the complement by quantifiers such as something, will be shown to be misguided. Quantifiers like something rather act as nominalizing expressions introducing ‘new’, derived objects into the semantic structure of a sentence. The resulting analyses will have several philosophical ramifications.