Advances in the Syntax of DPs - Structure, agreement, and case

66 Anna Bondaruk

3. How do equatives differ from predicational and specificational
   clauses in Polish?

There is a number of differences that set to-equatives apart from both predicational

and specificational clauses in Polish. We will discuss three of them here: pronominali-

sation in Left Dislocation, subject verb agreement, and the person restriction on the

subject of a copular clause. However, before examining how each of these tests works

for the three classes of copular clauses mentioned above, let us first briefly present

an inventory of predicational and specificational sentences in Polish. This will be the

main concern of Section 3.1, whereas Section 3.2 will concentrate on the differences

between equatives on the one hand, and predicational and specificational clauses on

the other.

3.1 Predicational and specificational clauses in Polish

Predicational sentences are taken to be those which, according to Higgins (1979),

ascribe some property to the subject. In this type of copular clause the subject corre-

sponds to an individual (type 〈e〉), while the predicate denotes a property (type 〈e, t〉).

In Polish there are three ways of realising this type of copular clause, i.e. by using

być + DPINST, być + DPNOM and to być + DPNOM. The examples of the first two cases are

provided in fn. 1, and will not be further examined here (for a detailed analysis of these

two types of sentences cf. Bondaruk 2013b), as the main focus of the paper is on those

copular clauses that host the pronominal copula to. The third type of predicational

clauses is illustrated in (9) below:

(9) Marek to (jest) dobry student.

Mark.nom cop is good student.nom

‘Mark is a good student.’

In (9) the property ascribed to the subject Mark is that of being a good student and

hence the sentence is predicational. It contains the copula to, followed by the verb

jest ‘is’, which can be regularly dropped in the present tense, in a way analogous to

However, in inverted predicational być-sentences, agreement is always with the post-copular

element, as confirmed by (ii) and (iii):

(ii) Student jestem ja.

student.nom am I.nom

‘#A student am I.’

(iii) Studentem jestem ja.

student.inst am I.nom

‘#A student am I.’