Abstract
Sentences like That’s a beautiful dress you’re wearing are commonly heard in colloquial English. These sentences have a surface form that resembles identificational copular sentences with relative clause modifiers (e.g., This is the house I mentioned) and cleft sentences with demonstrative subjects (e.g., That was John that I saw). Ever since Higgins’s (1973) seminal work, English copular sentences have received much attention, but sentences like That’s a beautiful dress you’re wearing have not been part of that discussion. In this squib, I show how these sentences are both similar and dissimilar to identificationals and clefts, and suggest a formal analysis that captures their characteristic properties.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 168-181 |
Number of pages | 14 |
Journal | Linguistic Inquiry |
Volume | 53 |
Issue number | 1 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Jan 12 2022 |
Keywords
- Clefts
- Copular sentences
- Demonstratives
- Focus
- Identificationals
- Relative clauses