Specificational subjects – a formal characterization and some consequences

This paper provides a formal semantic characterization of specificational copular clauses using the theory of noun phrase interpretation developed by Partee (1987). It is argued that specificational clauses involve an unusual alignment of a predicative noun phrase with the subject position. This leads to the prediction that only noun phrases capable of denoting predicates can occur in this position. The prediction is tested against three groups of NPs. While the first two groups behave as predicated, the behavior of the last group is puzzling in terms of their formal semantics. Based on the results of the corpus study reported in Birner (1996), I argue that this puzzle can be resolved by taking into account the information structure of specificational clauses, in particular the requirement that their subject be relatively familiar in the discourse.