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 () 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.