Two types of non-verbal predication in Modern Irish

In this paper, I present syntactic evidence from copular constructions in Irish to show that there are two distinct semantic "be" constructions: a predicative construction and an equative one. The task of isolating different semantic structures is made especially difficult by virtue of the fact that we can have no direct evidence for them. All semantic structure is mediated through syntactic phenomena. In this paper, I discuss a case where two syntactically distinct constructions correspond exactly to a controversial semantic split. The syntactic phenomenon can only be characterized in terms of this semantic difference, thus giving relatively straightforward evidence for the underlying semantic distinction. There are at least two current theories in the literature about the number of nonverbal predication constructions present in Universal Grammar. One view holds that there are two kinds of be constructions, one for equatives and one for predicatives, and these two differ in their argument structure. This view was proposed in philosophical works like Russell (1919) in the Fregean tradition, and is the approach adopted by Akmajian (1970), Higgins (1973), Zaring (1996), Rothstein (1987) and Rapoport (1987) among others: 1) Multiple Be Analysis (MBA) There are two kinds of copular structures: a) Predicative Structures NP2'(NP1) b) Equative Structures EQUALS'(NP1, NP2)