Heycock, Caroline and Kroch, Anthony (2002) Topic, Focus, and Syntactic Representations. In Mikkelsen, Line and Potts, Chris, Eds. Proceedings West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics 21, Santa Cruz.

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Abstract

This paper discusses "specificational" sentences, such as "The real problem is your relatives" and "What I was hoping for was his autograph", discusses some problems that arise from a simple treatment of them as equatives, and outlines an account in which a syntactic equative analysis is supplemented by reference to the particular information structure of this type of sentence.

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