The complement of transitive intensional verbs, like any nonreferential complement, can be replaced by a ‘special quantifier’
or ‘special pronoun’ such as
something, the same thing, or
what. In previous work on predicative complements and
that-clauses I argued that special quantifiers and pronouns introduce entities that would not have occurred in the semantic structure
of the sentence without the special quantifier, entities that one would refer to with the corresponding nominalization. Thus
something in
John thinks something or
the same thing in
John thinks the same thing as Mary ranges not over propositions, but rather over entities of the sort ‘John’s thought that S’ or ‘the thought that S’, without
those entities acting as arguments of the
think-relation. Despite initial apparent lack of evidence for this view for transitive verbs like
need, a closer inspection of a greater range of data gives in fact further support for the ‘Nominalization Theory’ of special
quantifiers, once ‘nominalization’ is viewed in a suitably extended and flexible way.
Keywords Transitive intensional verbs - Intensional quantifiers - Modality - Situation - Intensionality
I would like to thank the audiences at the Paris workshop Intensional Verbs and Nonreferential Complements, the University of Sendai (Japan), and Rutgers University for challenging discussion, and for Graeme Forbes and the two referees
for comments on a previous version of the paper.