Noncanonical Equatives

Most studies of marked syntactic constructions in English have focussed on constructions that employ noncanonical word order as the basis for identifying the markedness of those constructions. However, word order is not the only indicator of a marked construction. In this talk, I examine two noncanonical equative constructions in English whose noncanonical status does not derive from word order variation: DEFERRED EQUATIVES (Ward 2004) and EPISTEMIC WOULD EQUATIVES (Ward, Birner, and Kaplan 2003; Birner, Kaplan and Ward 2005):

(1)	a.	A: Who ordered what?
		B: I'm the Pad Thai.
		[OP: X CORRESPONDS TO Y]
	b.	A: What did Chris order?
		B: That would be the Pad Thai.
		[OP: CHRIS ORDERED X]

Claims:

• both types of equatives are focus-presupposition constructions, requiring a salient OPEN PROPOSITION (OP) for felicity (Prince 1986);
• they differ in the number of OP variables being instantiated as foci;
• the two arguments of deferred equatives correspond to the two (non-deferred) instantiations of the OP (Ward 2004), while the subject of epistemic would equatives corresponds to the unique variable of the OP (Birner, Kaplan, and Ward 2003);
• the constructions are formally marked as requiring a salient OP yet what marks them so is not word order.