62 Anna Bondaruk
and specificational copular clauses in Polish. Equatives differ considerably from
other copular clauses, particularly with respect to agreement, pronominalisa-
tion in Left Dislocation, and the person restriction, referred to in the literature
as the Person-Case Constraint (PCC). Since equatives behave in a way distinct
from other classes of copular clauses, they seem to require a different syntactic
structure. Two alternative structures for equatives are considered in the paper:
an asymmetrical structure along the lines postulated by Reeve (2010), and a sym-
metrical one found in Pereltsvaig (2001, 2007). We shall argue that the symmetri-
cal structure is superior to the asymmetrical one, as it offers a natural account
for the properties typical solely of equatives, without resorting to any additional
stipulations. We suggest that although Pereltsvaig’s analysis is on the right track
for Polish equatives, it needs to be modified to be able to incorporate both the
verbal and the pronominal copula that can co-occur in this type of copular clauses
in Polish. The trigger responsible for breaking the initial symmetry postulated by
Pereltsvaig is proved to be problematic and therefore Moro’s (2006) motivation for
symmetry breaking is adopted, which crucially relies on the necessity for the sym-
metrical structure to be labelled and clearly falls in with Chomsky’s (2013) ideas
concerning labelling.- Inventory of Polish equatives
Polish has two types of copula, the verbal one, which corresponds to the verb być ‘to
be’ and the pronominal one realised as the pronoun to. The two types of copula can
even co-occur. A detailed study of the distribution of the two types of Polish copula
can be found in Citko (2008) and Bondaruk (2013b), and here we will only focus on
those properties of the two copulas that are relevant to an analysis of Polish equatives
undertaken in this work. Actually both types of copula can be found in Polish equa-
tives, as can be seen in (1) and (2) below, where the former contains the verbal copula,
while the latter hosts the pronominal one.
(1) Ja jestem ty.
I.nom am you.nom
‘I am you.’
(2) Ja to ty.
I.nom cop you.nom
‘I am you.’
In (1) the verbal copula być ‘to be’ links two nominative case marked pronouns, which
makes equatives different from predicational sentences in which the verbal copula is