Copular Clauses

This book is concerned with a class of copular clauses known as specificational clauses, and its relation to other kinds of copular structures, predicational and equative clauses in particular. Based on evidence from Danish and English, I argue that specificational clauses involve the same core predication structure as predicational clauses — one which combines a referential and a predicative expression to form a minimal predicational unit — but differ in how the predicational core is realized syntactically. Predicational copular clauses represent the canonical realization, where the referential expression is aligned with the most prominent syntactic position, the subject position. Specificational clauses involve an unusual alignment of the predicative expression with subject position. I suggest that this unusual alignment is grounded in information structure: the alignment of the less referential DP with the subject position serves a discourse connective function by letting material that is relatively familiar in the discourse appear before material that is relatively unfamiliar in the discourse. Equative clauses are argued to be fundamentally different.

Michel DeGraff, Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, MIT:
This is a beautiful piece of work, one that I have had much pleasure reading and discussing with students and colleagues. Mikkelsen's account of copular clauses is simply elegant. She is so thorough in her treatment of these copular constructions that in our discussion of her analysis in a recent MIT seminar there wasn't any comment that wasn't already anticipated in her own caveats and footnotes.