This book offers a syntax and a semantics of nonverbal predicates (i.e., nominal, adjectival, and prepositional predicates) in copular sentences. It explores how the different interpretations of nonverbal predicates can be accounted for in a system that maintains a single structure for predication. The book departs from earlier studies by arguing in favor of a ternary distinction between defining/characterizing/situation-descriptive predicates rather than the more common stage-level/individual-level distinction. The distinction is based on two semantic criteria, namely maximality (i.e., whethe ... More

This book offers a syntax and a semantics of nonverbal predicates (i.e., nominal, adjectival, and prepositional predicates) in copular sentences. It explores how the different interpretations of nonverbal predicates can be accounted for in a system that maintains a single structure for predication. The book departs from earlier studies by arguing in favor of a ternary distinction between defining/characterizing/situation-descriptive predicates rather than the more common stage-level/individual-level distinction. The distinction is based on two semantic criteria, namely maximality (i.e., whether the predicate describes an eventuality that has spatio-temporal properties or not) and density (i.e. whether the spatio-temporal properties are perceived as atomic or not). The book argues in favor of a strong correlation between the semantic properties of predicates and their internal syntactic structure. Density and maximality are structurally realized in two distinct projections, namely Classifier Phrases and Number Phrases, respectively. Predicates interpreted as maximal involve a NumP layer; predicates interpreted as non-dense involve a ClP layer; while dense predicates lack both projections. The analysis is shown to account for apparently unrelated data across languages as the apparent optionality of the indefinite article in French, the distribution of the two copulas serestar in Spanish, the distribution of nominal and adjectival predicates in Irish, and case marking on Russian predicates. The languages this study is based on are primarily French, Spanish, Modern Irish, and Russian.