Not all specificational sentences are reversible Martina Martinović Universität Leipzig martina.martinovic@uni-leipzig.de Specificational sentences, both copular (here NP-Pred) clauses and pseudoclefts, have long been attracting the attention of researchers, due to their syntactic, semantic and pragmatic character- istics. In this squib I address one property that is claimed to be the hallmark of both specifica- tional NP-Pred sentences (His most important quality is his honesty) and specificational pseudoclefts (What is most important about him is his honesty) – the reversibility of their two constituents around the copula. The fact that in both clause types the two main constituents seem to be able to surface in either order is often taken to be evidence for predicate inversion/raising, the raising of an under- lying predicate to the structural subject position (or possibly a higher projection). I here present data from Wolof NP-Pred clauses and pseudoclefts that speak in favor of inversion, but only for specificational pseudoclefts. Specificational NP-Pred clauses are identical to predicational sentences in the relevant respect, which supports a non-inversion analysis for this clause type. 1 A ′ -movement in Wolof NP-Pred clauses and pseudoclefts All non-verbal sentences in Wolof are A ′ -movement constructions, and they always contain an overt complementizer, (l)a. In most A ′ -movement clauses, the complementizer exhibits a subject/non- subject asymmetry – it surfaces as a in local subject extraction, and as la in the extraction of any other constituent, as in subject and object Exhaustive Identification (EI) examples in (1). In Wolof, an EI-ed constituent is obligatorily moved to Spec,CP, though this position can be occupied by non-EI-ed elements as well. 1 (1) Subject/non-subject asymmetry in Wolof Exhaustive Identification a. Usmaan Oussman a C lekk eat maafe. mafe “ It’s Oussman who ate mafe.” b. Maafe mafe l-a l-C Usmaan Oussman lekk eat “ It’s mafe that Oussman ate.” NP-Pred sentences in Wolof are wh-movement constructions, and the ones that concern us in this squib do not contain an overt copula. In predicational sentences (where a property expressed by the NP is predicated of the subject), as in (2), the nominal predicate (sàcc ’thief’) is A ′ -moved to Spec,CP , and the clause-internal subject is obligatorily a clitic (ñu). A non-clitic subject (xale yi ’the 1 For an analysis of Exhaustive Identification in Wolof as a phenomenon unrelated to focusing, but as a type of predication, see Author et al. to appear. For similar proposals for Hungarian, see Wedgwood 2003; É. Kiss 2006. 1