Connectivity Effects and Questions as Specificational Subjects

Connectivity effects have been central issues in dealing with specificational pseudoclefts. While syntactic approaches motivate their analysis in order to explain connectivity effects in terms of a connected clause, these accounts have numerous problems including a wide range of anti-connectivity effects that constitute crucial counterevidence. On the other hand, semantic accounts of connectivity effects treat BV and BT connectivity by independent interpretive mechanisms providing a more fundamental explanation for connectivity effects. Yet existing semantic accounts have limitations in explaining syntactic properties and syntactic connectivity effects in SPCs, and in accounting for BV anti-connectivity effects in English. Focusing on BV connectivity, this paper explores how the relevant (anti-)connectivity facts can be accounted for by an analysis that provides both an elaborate syntactic analysis of SPCs and a semantic mechanism for bound anaphora. Based on Yoo's (2005) non-deletion based, question-answer pair analysis of SPCs, this paper shows that a functional question analysis of a specificational subject, when combined with a theory of operator scope and a non-configurational condition on bound anaphora, can explain various BV (anti-)connectivity patterns in SPCs and related constructions.