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
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