64 Anna Bondaruk
to, although they lack a past or future tense interpretation and are then understood as
referring to the present only. Consequently, the verbal copula drop in (4) and (5) is not
possible without affecting the meaning of these sentences.
(4) Ja to *(byłem) ty.
I.nom cop be.past 1 sg you.nom
‘I was you.’
(5) Ja to *(będę) ty.
I.nom cop be.fut 1 sg you.nom
‘I will be you.’
The data above seem to indicate that to-copular clauses represent the variant of to być
clauses with the verbal copula dropped in the present tense. For this reason to-copular
clauses and to być sentences will be treated here as one type (as in Bondaruk 2013b),
and therefore we will use the term to-equatives throughout the paper as a shorthand
for both equatives with just to and those containing both to and być ‘ t o b e ’.
Although the equatives in (1)–(3) do not sound very natural out of context, they
can be found in the National Corpus of the Polish Language 〈www.nkjp.pl〉, supplied
with the appropriate context. For instance, (1) can be found in the following passage:
(6) ...nawet wszyscy ludzie, jakich spotkał w swoim nieskomplikowanym życiu,
zlewali się w jedno stawali się tym samym, czym był on – jedną cierpiącą
duszą. Ja jestem ty, ty jesteś ja!
(J. Iwaszkiewicz ‘Brzezina’)
‘... even all the people he has met in his uncomplicated life, were blending
into one and were becoming the same that he was – one suffering soul –
I am you, you are me!’
As far as (2) is concerned (and (3), which is a variant of (2), see above), it occurs in the
National Corpus in the context provided below:
(7) Ty jesteś ten prawiczek, a ja to ty. (I. Iredyński ‘Dzień oszusta’)
‘You are the virgin, and I am you.’
The property common to all the instances of equatives provided above is the fact that
they contain two pronouns flanking the copula. Another possibility which is found
with just the pronominal copula, but not with the verbal one, arises in case two proper
names are linked by the copula.^4 This is illustrated in (8) below.- Sentence (i) below with just the verbal copula is unacceptable, in contradistinction to the
one in (8).
(i) *Dr Jekyll jest pan Hyde.
Dr. Jekyll.nom is Mr. Hyde.nom
‘Dr. Jekyll is Mr. Hyde.’