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Min-Joo Kim
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Publisher: Journals Gateway
Linguistic Inquiry (2022) 53 (1): 168–181.
Published: 05 January 2022
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Sentences like That’s a beautiful dress you’re wearing are commonly heard in colloquial English. These sentences have a surface form that resembles identificational copular sentences with relative clause modifiers (e.g., This is the house I mentioned ) and cleft sentences with demonstrative subjects (e.g., That was John that I saw ). Ever since Higgins’s (1973) seminal work, English copular sentences have received much attention, but sentences like That’s a beautiful dress you’re wearing have not been part of that discussion. In this squib, I show how these sentences are both similar and dissimilar to identificationals and clefts, and suggest a formal analysis that captures their characteristic properties.