Polish equatives as symmetrical structures 67
to- equatives described in Section 2 (cf. example (3) above). It is worth noting that
sentences such as (9) are not most natural to convey the predicational meaning in Pol-
ish, and the more natural variant is the one with the verbal copula być ‘to be’ followed
by the nominal predicate marked for the instrumental (cf. example (ii) in fn. (1).
Specificational sentences, following Higgins (1979), are understood here as those
that specify who a given individual is or what a given object is. In specificational
clauses the pre-verbal element denotes a property (type 〈e, t〉), while the post-verbal
element is an individual (type 〈e〉). This type of copular clause can be realized in Polish
only by means of the pronominal copula, with or without the verb być ‘to be’, as can be
seen in (10a), but not just by the verbal copula być ‘to be’ alone, as confirmed by the
ungrammaticality of (10b):^7
(10) a. Dobry student to (jest) Marek.
good.nom student.nom cop is Mark.nom
‘A good student is Mark.’
b. *Dobry student jest Marek.
good.nom student.nom is Mark.nom
‘A good student is Mark.’
Although it might seem that specificational sentences like the one in (10a) result
from predicate inversion, along the lines postulated for English specificationals by,
for instance, Moro (1990, 1997) and Mikkelsen (2005), among others, it is argued in
Bondaruk (2013a, b) that this is not the right derivation for sentences of this type
in Polish. She draws on the evidence based on binding and extraction to argue that
the inverted predicate in specificational sentences such as (10a) above occupies a left
peripheral position in a clause, presumably [Spec, TopP], but not a canonical subject
position (for details, cf. Bondaruk 2013a, b).^8
- Sentences such as (i) below with the verb być ‘to be’ and the inverted instrumental predi-
cate are perfectly licit, and look very much like sentence (10a).
(i) Dobrym studentem jest Marek.
good.inst student.inst is Mark.nom
‘A good student is Mark.’
However, (i) differs from sentences such as (10a) above with respect to a number of tests
such as the deletion of the copula, VP coordination, and Left Dislocation and patterns with
predicational, rather than specificational sentences (for details cf. Bondaruk 2013a, b). This
claim seems to run counter Partee’s (1998) observation, based solely on the meaning of the
sentences of this type, that Russian inverse copula clauses are uniformly specificational.
- Inverted predicates in specificational clauses do reconstruct for the purposes of variable
binding, as can be seen in (i) below, which serves as an argument that they occupy an A′-
position.