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This paper offers a discourse-pragmatic account of the constraint on indefinite DPs as subjects of specificational copular clauses (a doctor is Mary). Building on Mikkelsen's (2004) proposal that specificational subjects are topics, I argue that they must be contrastive topics which properly contain F-marked constituents. I show that this can account for the absolute ban on simple indefinite subjects, and allow for more complex indefinites to be subjects. Finally, I discuss the syntactic analysis that would be predicted given my pragmatic analysis, and the puzzles that arise from it.

I present and argue for a theory of adjuncts according to which, adjuncts and their respective hosts are derived as separate, parallel objects that are not combined until forced to by the process of linearization. I formalize the notion of the workspace, and the workspace-based operation MERGE. Finally, I show that this approach to adjuncts naturally accounts for Adjunct Islands and Parasitic Gaps and is consistent with adjective ordering constraints.

Using the framework based on set-theory, I develop a formal definition of Agree as a syntactic operation. I begin by constructing a formal definition of a version of long-distance Agree in which a structurally higher element values a feature on a structurally lower element, and modify that definition to reflect various versions of Agree that have been proposed in the “minimalist” literature. I then discuss the theoretical implications of these formal definitions, arguing that Agree requires a new conception of the lexicon, and unjustifiably violates NTC in all its non-vacuous forms.

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