Experimental evidence for a tenseless declarative clause type in English

This paper proposes that the amalgam pseudocleft construction in English (e.g., What she likes is she likes coffee) is atemporal, in contrast to the canonical pseudocleft (e.g., What she likes is coffee). Evidence from informal acceptability surveys and controlled judgment tasks shows that the amalgam pseudocleft's copula fails to combine with TP material and fails to support a temporal interpretation. The amalgam pseudocleft is nevertheless finite: its copula is inflected, and it is anchored to the utterance context. Anchoring in the amalgam pseudocleft obtains in an unusual way, namely, via a direct relation between the copular predication and the deictic utterance context.