Rethinking of Seem -constructions

This paper reveals two curious oddities involved in Moro’s (1997) small clause analysis of the seem -constructions; (i) it employs a self-contradictory notion of “expletive predicate”, and (ii) seemingly paradoxical examples exist within the approach. This paper demonstrates that these and other related questions can easily be resolved using a slight modification of the analysis proposed by Moro himself and in conjunction with Son’s (2014) principle of Distinctness of Copies. One desirable consequences of this lies in its availability as an empirical piece of evidence for the notion of the “expletive subject.”