Small clauses reconsidered: Not so small and not all alike

Abstract

This paper re-examines a syntactic typology of small clause constructions, based on new crosslinguistic evidence from languages that allow two different kinds of copula elements: verbal copulas and pronominal copulas. Such languages include Arabic ( Eid, 1983), Hebrew ( Doron, 1983; Rapoport, 1987), Russian ( Pereltsvaig, 2001), Polish ( Rothstein, 1986), Scottish Gaelic ( Adger and Ramchand, 2003), among others. The two types of copular constructions in these languages have been argued to correlate with a difference in interpretation along the predicational/equative dimension, and with a structural difference involving the size of the small clause. This paper re-examines both semantic and syntactic differences between the two types, focusing on new data from Polish. It focuses on selection, case, extraction possibilities, and interpretation, and argues that the differences between the two types of small clauses lie not in the size of the small clause, but in the featural make-up of the functional projection heading it.