Identity and information: Semantic and pragmatic aspects of specificational sentences

Specificational sentences are famous because they exhibit connectivity. Connectivity refers to the fact that the pre- and the post-copular phrase in a copular sentence behave as if they were in a c-command configuration. More Specifically, a number of syntactic and semantic phenomena that are usually found only under a c-command configuration are licensed in specificational sentences across the copula, i.e. where this configuration is absent.; This has lead researchers in the generative tradition to assume that a c-command configuration is available at an abstract level. This dissertation argues against such attempts, with special attention to the Question-Answer approach that has gained popularity in recent years. Instead, I argue for a direct compositional analysis of connectivity effects in which specificational sentences are analyzed as identity sentences as seen on the surface, and each connectivity effect is a by-product of certain syntactic and semantic combinatorics; the denotations of the elements are independently motivated for other environments. This analysis is applied to Hebrew, which has two subsets of specificational sentences, each exhibiting a different range of connectivity effects. It is concluded that this pattern cannot be accounted for by any approach that derives connectivity using a single mechanism which characterizes specificational sentences.; Since there is no one-to-one correlation between connectivity and specificational sentences, it is concluded that connectivity is not a defining characteristic of specificational sentences. This leaves the question unanswered of what defines specificational sentences and how they differ from other copular sentences, especially from other identity sentences.; It is proposed that specification is defined by a certain pragmatic relation between the pre- and the post-copular expressions of an identity sentence. In particular, the post-copular expression is more 'discriminate' than the pre-copular expression with respect to the identity of the entity denoted. The notion of 'discriminability' is independently motivated by a new pattern from the choice of referring expressions. The discriminability perspective allows us to reduce the standard four-way typology of copular sentences into a three-way typology, and suggests that it may be possible to further reduce the typology to a two-way typology.