Earticle

Although much research has been done in multiple nominative constructions (MNCs), it is difficult to analyze their syntactic structures and derivations in that they contain two nominative-marked phrases whose functions are different. This paper shows that the two nominative DPs in MNCs are indeed subjects, not topic or focus. We assume that the two nominative DPs are located in [Spec, RefP] and [Spec, TP] respectively and the MNCs involve the predication operation which make the head predicate and its θ-selected argument (the inner subject) a compound predicate. We also argue that MNCs should be derived through movement, not base-generation, from more basic underlying structures. We will demonstrate that our analysis has a lot of advantages.