Copular sentences

This chapter discusses copular clauses: clauses in which the contentful predicate is not a verb, but some other category such as AP, NP/DP, or PP. The principal focus is on binominal copular clauses (clauses where both the subject and the predicate are NPs/DPs). The chapter goes through the four types of copular clauses in the typology due to Higgins (1973; 1979) – predicational, specificational, equational, and identificational – and for each type presents some of the main findings from the literature, as well as unresolved questions. The issues discussed include the appropriate denotations of the principal syntactic components of copular clauses, and what what kinds of motivation there are for a more articulated syntactic structure than is obvious on the surface.