Intensional Subjects and Indirect Contextual Anchoring

Abstract

This paper brings evidence in favour of the semantic-pragmatic characterization of subjects of specificational copular clauses proposed in Comorovski (2007). The evidence is based on Romanian questions of the form Care-copula-DP? (‘Which/what copula DP?’), some of which are argued to be specificational questions. It is shown that the subject of these questions is of the type of individual concepts (<s, e>) and that it must contain a referential expression that anchors it to the context of utterance. The subject of a specificational care-question is generally definite; it can be indefinite just in case the question contains a subjective predicate and the copula is in the conditional mood. We show that an indefinite noun phrase cannot be the subject of a constituent question unless the question has a topic other than the subject. We argue that the point of view argument of a subjective predicate can function as a sentence topic. Therefore, if specificational care-question contain a subjective predicate, they allow an indefinite subject since they have a non-subject topic.