Coreference Violations ‘Beyond Principle B’

Jayaseelan (1992) aims to account for the fact that ‘inverse copula sentences’ such as My best friend is John may exclude coreference between a Name and a pronoun in the absence of the c-command configuration which triggers the application of Principle B of the Binding Theory. For example, the inverse copula sentence His teacher is John’s brother disallows coreference between his andJohn, while the corresponding predicative sentence, in which the structural relation between pronoun and name is identical, allows it: His brother is John’s teacher. Jayaseelan proposes an LF movement which creates a configuration subject to Principle B and which applies in a natural way to the inverse sentence but not to the corresponding canonical predicative sentence. I adopt Jay’s idea that LF movement provides the key to an account of coreference violations ‘beyond Principle B’ in the inverse copula sentence. I propose that the Focus constituent of the inverse sentence is preposed and subsequently 'deconstructed' into a Focus of Focus (F/F) and a presupposition of Focus (p/F). The rules which determine the interpretation of NPs at the syntaxsemantics interface then suffice to account for coreference violations both in the inverse copula sentence and in other sentence types.