The situation reading in copular sentences with agreement mismatch: a derivational problem

Resumo

This squib briefly addresses a problem in the literature on copular sentences with agreement mismatch. There are several proposals that deal with this kind of data, but they do not present a proper solution to the semantic problem of deriving the situation reading that these sentences are associated with. In the first section, we introduce this construction with data from Brazilian Portuguese (BP). We also discuss some distinguishing properties of these sentences which set them apart from copular sentences with regular agreement: (i) agreement mismatch; (ii) interpretation of the subject as a situation and not as an entity; (iii) restriction of the subject to bare nominals and numeral phrases only; and (iv) the predicate is restricted to adjectives that select a situation, and all these adjectives are evaluative. Based on these facts, we consider that these copular sentences deserve a syntactic and semantic treatment that differs from the treatment that is generally proposed for copular sentences with regular agreement. In section two, we review three previous analyses of the topic: Greenberg’s (2008) analysis for Modern Hebrew; Josefsson’s (2009, 2014) analysis for Swedish; and Rodrigues and Foltran’s (2014, 2015) analysis for BP. We show that these analyses resort to a stipulation to account for the situation reading. Finally we suggest that, since these adjectives are evaluative, the situation reading could be derived as an evaluation criterion.