Copular Constructions in English

Abstract

This Chapter looks at the structure of copular sentences in English. There are two basic issues which concern us. The first, which follows directly on from the discussion of Hebrew copular constructions in the previous Chapter, is the fact that in English too, small uninflected clauses are possible, but not if the small clause is an expression of identity. In the previous Chapter we saw that in Hebrew a semantically null Inflectional element is necessary in identity Statements to create a syntactic predication structure, but not in small clauses, where the predication structure is created by the relation between the inherently predicative XP and the subject. In English, the same phenomenon occurs, but there are two major differences. First, we don’t get the contrast in matrix sentences, since English doesn’t allow uninflected matrix clauses, except in the ‘echoic’ questions and exclamations discussed in Akmajian (1984), and noted in Chapter 2. Second, English requires Inflection to take a VP complement, and thus the contrast is not between small clauses and inflected small clauses, but between small clauses and IPs with infinitivally marked VPs, as illustrated in(l):