Since Bowers 1993 , it has been accepted that nonverbal small clauses are headed by a functional head, Pred 0 , whose function is to obligatorily mediate all nonverbal predication. I argue against this hypothesis by critically reanalyzing the original syntactic arguments for PredP, examining possible semantic support for mediated predication, and reviewing the putative crosslinguistic evidence for overt equivalence of Pred 0 . I first demonstrate that the facts originally taken as motivating a functional head in small clauses can now be accounted for by independently needed assumptions. I then show that standard Montagovian semantics treating NPs, APs, and PPs as unsaturated functions requires no mediating projection and that suggested alternative meanings for Pred 0 either fail or cannot be used as motivation for its existence. Finally, I provide evidence that the syntax of copular particles and other “overt predicators” is different from that expected of Pred 0 in such ways that they cannot be taken as prima facie evidence for it either. I sketch an alternative theory linking the use of predicative particles to nominal predication and provide evidence for it from crosslinguistic lexicalization patterns of copular particles. In sum, neither theoretical nor empirical considerations require a mediating functional head in small clauses, and therefore the PredP hypothesis should be abandoned.

This article investigates the validity of the theory of mediated predication by examining one of the proposed overt realizations of Pred0. Taking the law of parsimony as our starting position and using evidence from English, Russian, and Serbo-Croatian, we argue that the element that looks like the preposition ‘for’ is, in fact, a preposition (not Pred 0 ), and we show how it explains the syntax and the semantics of the relevant ‘for’ sequences. Cases of apparently predicative interpretation of ‘for’-PP result from the interplay between the meaning of the preposition ‘for’ and the metaphorical reinterpretation of motion and locative verbs that ‘for’-PPs combine with.

In this article, we present the morphosyntactic structure underlying the Russian adjectival declension and the phonological rules that apply to it to derive the surface representations. We describe the two declension classes of Russian adjectives and argue that adjectives and nouns employ the same theme suffixes (- oj - and - o -) and, importantly, that choice of theme suffix also determines choice of Case exponents. On this view, there is no special adjectival declension class; instead, Case exponents are shared between adjectives and nouns, and the choice of a “paradigm” is determined by the choice of the theme suffix. The article covers all adjectival inflections, including those of the possessives, demonstratives, interrogatives, and paucal numerals.

In this article, I address the issue of head movement in current linguistic theory. I propose a new view of the nature of heads and head movement that reveals that head movement is totally compliant with the standardly suggested properties of grammar. To do so, I suggest that head movement is not a single syntactic operation, but a combination of two operations: a syntactic one (movement) and a morphological one (m-merger). I then provide independent motivation for m-merger, arguing that it can be attested in environments where no head movement took place