Some arguments against some prevalent ideas on specificational sentences

Abstract

Copular sentences where the copula is flanked by two DPs fall into two types: predicational or ascriptive (John is the physician) and specificational (The physician is John), to use the most widely accepted terms. However, according to the dominant view in the generative transformational framework, this divide, to some extent, is spurious since underlyingly specificational sentences would be predicational. Contrary to this position, I argue that the partition is real, irreducible, and syntactically-based. With this goal in mind, I discuss and reinterpret some well known data and present some new ones.

How to Cite

Rosselló, J., (2008) “Some arguments against some prevalent ideas on specificational sentences”, Journal of Portuguese Linguistics 7(2), 109-130. doi: https://doi.org/10.5334/jpl.130

Download

Download PDF

285

Views

64

Downloads

Share

Authors

Joana Rosselló (Universitat de Barcelona)

Download

Issue

Publication details

Dates

Licence

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0

Identifiers

Peer Review

This article has been peer reviewed.

File Checksums (MD5)

  • PDF: 51e5261834516b2a109ddab0b9912c0f