The Non-Concealed Nature of Free Relatives : Implications for Connectivity in Specificational Sentences

1. INTRODUCTION Connectivity is the name for the effect that elements within the pre-and the post-copular phrases in specificational sentences behave as if they were in a c-command configuration, though they are not. This effect is found with a range of syntactic and semantic phenomena, which are therefore referred to as connectivity effects. Examples of connectivity effects are the distribution of anaphors and negative polarity items, the availability of opaque readings and binding relations, and Case and agreement markings. The existence of these effects poses a real challenge to direct compositionality, because a direct compositionality analysis of connectivity requires abandoning well-established analyses of these phenomena that are all based on c-command and instead developing new analyses that do not rely on such a notion. An apparently simpler option is to assume a grammatical operation that posits the desired c-command configuration at an abstract level of representation; this would allow one to maintain the current c-command based analyses of the different phenomena. This option, which we will generally refer to as the reconstruction strategy, has received a number of implementations in the generative literature in the last forty years. One of the main problems with these implementations is the lack of independent evidence for the abstract level of representation. A promising implementation of the reconstruction strategy is the so-called " question-answer " approach, originally due to Ross (1972), which takes specificational sentences to be question-answer pairs. Under this approach, the desired c-command configuration is restored in the post-copular full answer. The " question-answer " approach is particularly attractive because positing the desired c-command configuration is independently motivated by the status of the post-copular phrase as a full answer. Two versions of the question-answer approach have been proposed recently. Den Dikken, Meinunger and Wilder (2000) analyze the pre-copular phrase as a question syntactically and semantically, while Schlenker (2003) and Romero (to appear, this * We would like to thank our language consultants without whom this work would not have been possible: Torrence, and the native speakers of English at the UCLA linguistics department. A slightly different version of this paper appeared as Chapter 2 in Heller (2005).