Specificity and Definiteness in Copular Structure

This paper claims that the specificational copular sentence is an inverse predicational copular sentence, and that the predicational copular sentence and specificational copular sentence take one and the same be. The difference between definiteness and specificity of pre-copula and post-copula DPs is responsible for various interpretations of copular sentences. In other words, both sorts of sentences are equally represented on the basis of their own syntactic structures. Differences between both sentences, however, arise from strength of the functional heads included in the splited DP. Two functional categories are proposed: SpP and DefP. In predicational copular sentences, the pre-copula DP has [+specific, +definite] features and the post-copula DP has [-specific, -definite] features. Whereas, in specificational copular sentences, the pre-copula DP has [-specific, +definite] features and the post-copula DP has [+specific, +definite] features. For this reason, several kinds of copular sentences are claimed to emerge.