; In null instantiation (NI) an optionally unexpressed argument receives either anaphoric or existential interpretation (Fillmore, 1986; Mauner & Koenig, 2000; Kay, 2002; Ruppenhofer & Michaelis, 2010, 2014).; Examples include Lexically licensed NI (Nixon resigned.), Contextual accessibility NI (Can I see?), Labelese (Contains alcohol), Diary NI (Got up, got out of bed, dragged a comb across my head), Generic-habitual NI (The police only arrest (people) when there's probable cause). We think of a predicator as having NI potential when; one or more of its frame elements may remain unexpressed under certain conditions. While one cannot accurately predict a predicator's NI potential based either on semantic factors (e.g., Aktionsart class of; the verb, as in Hovav & Levin (1998)) or pragmatic factors (e.g., relative discourse prominence of arguments, as in Goldberg (2006)), NI potential, while highly constrained, is not simply lexical; idiosyncrasy, but is instead the product of both lexical and constructional licensing. In the latter case, a construction can endow a verb with NI potential that it would not otherwise have. Using; representational tools of Sign Based Construction Grammar (Sag 2012, a.o), we offer a lexical treatment of null instantiation that covers both distinct patterns of construal of null instantiated arguments and the difference between listeme-based and contextually licensed, thus construction-based, null complementation
