Chapter 9. Connectivity and definiteness in an English equative construction

This chapter describes the syntactic behavior of constructions like the prospects are for peace. The construction is argued to be a sub-case of equational (or ‘specificational’) copular constructions. It is shown that the construction exhibits a definiteness effect on the subject of the copula and an indefiniteness effect on the complement of for, not shared by similar equational sentences. An explanation is provided that derives the descriptive pattern from general properties holding at the interface of the syntactic and semantic components in conjunction with local deletion operations operating at the interface with the phonological component.