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1 results

  • The contrastive topic requirement on specificational subjects

  • Daniel Milway
  • Journal:
    Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique / Volume 65 / Issue 2 / June 2020
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    19 May 2020, pp. 181-215
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  • This paper offers a discourse-pragmatic account of the constraint on indefinite DPs as subjects of specificational copular clauses (a doctor is Mary). Building on Mikkelsen's (2004) proposal that specificational subjects are topics, I argue that they must be contrastive topics which properly contain F-marked constituents. I show that this can account for the absolute ban on simple indefinite subjects, and allow for more complex indefinites to be subjects. Finally, I discuss the syntactic analysis that would be predicted given my pragmatic analysis, and the puzzles that arise from it.