A ‘big DP’ analysis of Russian copular constructions with <em>èto</em>

Abstract

This paper develops a novel analysis of &egrave;to copular constructions in Russian. First, we address&nbsp;&lsquo;NOMpre&nbsp;&egrave;to NOMpost&rsquo; constructions, where NOM is a nominative noun phrase. We propose that&nbsp;there are two predication relations established in such clauses: one on the clausal level, with&nbsp;NOMpost being the subject of predication, and another one within the constituent headed by&nbsp;&egrave;to. The latter, we argue, constitutes a &lsquo;big DP&rsquo;: it contains NOMpre in the specifier position and&nbsp;pro in the complement position of D0; a predication relation is established between the two&nbsp;with the help of the predicativizer &egrave;to. The analysis is extended to account for &lsquo;&egrave;to NOMpost&rsquo;&nbsp;constructions. The proposal goes against treating &egrave;to in &lsquo;(NOMpre) &egrave;to NOMpost&rsquo; constructions&nbsp;as the subject of predication or as a dedicated functional head on the clausal spine; it also&nbsp;explicitly rejects treating NOMpre in all &lsquo;(NOMpre) &egrave;to NOMpost&rsquo; constructions as a hanging topic. The&nbsp;proposed analysis captures all the relevant properties of &egrave;to constructions and makes important&nbsp;predictions about their distribution, the agreement pattern, and the properties of NOMpost. The&nbsp;&lsquo;big DP&rsquo; approach also allows us to establish a link between &egrave;to copular constructions and&nbsp;specificational pseudo-clefts.