Jaume Solà i Pujols - Departament de Filologia Catalana ...

stimulus: probably the reluctant speakers had never used or even heard the sentences predicted to
be good, but they 'know' that they are at least much better than the ones predicted to be wrong.
Summing up, we have established and accounted for the following generalization:
(70) In Anaphoric Copulative Constructions, the post-copular element is [-anaphoric] in NSLs
and [+anaphoric] in non-NSLs.
There are some cases that seem to be problematic or constitute counter-examples to this
generalization. First of all, some languages simply do not have the construction: Brazilian
Portuguese, Russian and Georgian cannot, as far as I know, express the idea of 'being oneself'
with a similar construction. They instead use alternative paraphrase (such as 'to be the same
person he was', 'to have changed radically', etc.). I think this is to be expected: we are dealing
with a rather idiosyncratic construction. 77
There are, in addition, two cases that are more problematic. One is Greek. In Greek, it is
the non-clitic reflexive which is used in this case, rather than a pronominal:
(71) O jánis dhen íne pja o eaftós tu
The J. not is anymore the self his
where o eaftós tu is the Nominative form of the reflexive in Greek. I think, however, that this is
not necessarily a counterexample. Notice that this reflexive form has an internal structure where
the actually bound element is a pronominal in the genitive position:
77 One could even think that 'John is (not) himself' is a
tautology/contradiction, and that only pragmatic efforts to make
the best out of any expression (in the spirit of Sperber &
Wilson (1986)) rescue it.
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