Possessive binding in copular sentences and the logic of identification

Given the early nineteenth-century view according to which the copula is ambiguous between identity and predication, (pronominal) binding facts in copular structures have been taken to be evidence for a unified predicational analysis. This contribution supports the claim that binominal copulars are not ambiguous, while rejecting the familiar hypothesis that one of the DPs involved is necessarily a predicate. First, we show that binding of possessive pronouns is in fact generally allowed in binominal copulars, contrary to the received wisdom. Second, we show this to be compatible only with rejecting Longobardi and Moro’s small-clause analysis, whereby one of the two DPs is a predicate, and with adopting the view that the two DPs are related by an abstract head, which we interpret as a silent predicate of asymmetric identification. We further argue that the cases in which binding is illegitimate involve strict identity under pragmatic strengthening, whose result is semantically awkward and can only be rescued in pragmatically supportive contexts.