Chapter One Introduction 1.1 The Anomaly of the Nominal Predicate Licensing in Small Clauses 1.2 Four Puzzles in NSCs 1.3 Our Proposal 1.4 Significance of the Study 1.5 Organization of the Book Chapter Two Literature Review 2.1 Predicate NP Licensing: an Understated Field 2.2 The Caseless Hypothesis 2.3 The Default Case Hypothesis 2.4 The Case Agreement Hypothesis 2.5 The Structural Case Hypothesis 2.6 Summary Chapter Three From Case-assignment to Case-checking 3.1 The Origin of Case 3.2 Term Definition 3.2.1 Morphological Case vs. Abstract Case 3.2.2 Structural Case, Inherent Case and Lexical Case 3.2.3 The Type of Case That Nominal Predicates 3.3 Case-assignment within GB 3.3.1 Case-assigning Categories within GB 3.3.2 Configurations for Case-assignment 3.3.3 The Syntactic Level Where Case-assignment Occurs 3.3.4 Case Percolation 3.4 Case-checking within MP 3.4.1 Basic Concepts of the Minimalist Program 3.4.2 Feature-checking-based Case Theory 3.4.3 Configurations for Agr-Based Case Checking 3.4.4 Configurations for Agr-less Case Checking 3.4.5 Agree Operation 3.5 Summary Chapter Four The Clausal Structure of NSCs 4.1 Term Definition 4.2 Basic Features of Nominal Small Clauses 4.2.1 Argument-like Predicate 4.2.2 Distribution. Only as Complement 4.2.3 Predication or Equation 4.2.4 Individual-level Predication 4.2.5 Non-specificity of Predicate NPs 4.3 The Categorial Node of Small Clauses 4.3.1 Unitary Constituent or Not 4.3.2 Lexical Head or Functional Head 4.3.3 Small Clauses as PrP Chapter Five NP Licensing Mechanism in NSCs 5.1 Derivation and Feature Checking in NSCs
5.1.1 Merge 5.1.2 Multiple Agree by Moving 5.1.3 Locality in Agree 5.1.4 Covert Movement or Copy 5.2 Answers to the Puzzles in NSCs 5.2.1 About the Acceptability of NSCs 5.2.2 About "as" 5.2.3 About "believe" and "think" Chapter Six Conclusion 6.1 Summary 6.2 Findings and Implications 6.3 Limitations and Future Research Appendix Bibliography Index
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