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

There seems to be an interesting correlation between the NSL status and the possibility of
having an inverted agreement pattern of some copulative constructions of the type (examples
from Catalan):
(98) a. El president sóc jo
The president am I
'I am the president'
b. *The president am I/me
We cannot simply say that 0.a) is a case of subject inversion, because then the preverbal
subject would have to be a dislocated element without a resumptive clitic. Actually, nominal
predicates can dislocate, and then a clitic is used as a resumptive element:
(99) El president, no *(ho/el) sóc pas
The president, not it/him-am at-all
'The president, I am certainly not'
So the clitic is obligatory in 0 and impossible in 0, which suggests el president is not
dislocated in 0.a).
On the other hand, the possibility of 0.a) seems tightly correlated with the NSL status:
Old French had the equivalent of 0.a) and lost it as it lost its NSL status.
In order to derive these facts, we need some previous theoretical assumptions. First, I
adhere to the view, defended by several authors (Andrea Moro, Giuseppe Longobardi) that all
copulative constructions contain a predicate, and there are no 'equative' constructions. Therefore,
el president in the above examples has to be the predicate element, for pronoun (jo 'I') cannot
plausibly be a predicate. The underlying structure for the above examples would be:
1