1.2 Four Puzzles in NSCs

First, nominal small clauses show lower acceptablity than finite clauses and infinitives.This is found in the Questionnaire on Acceptability of English Small Clauses（See Appendix）among English native speakers.The latter two structures are ranked between“perfectly acceptable”and“quite acceptable”with the average score of 4.53 and 4.33 respectively.But nominal small clauses are“just acceptable”with the average score of 2.9.Then can we attribute this degradation in acceptability to the anomaly in small clauses?

Second, there is a cross-linguistic distribution gap.In other Romance languages, like Italian, French and German, nominative small clauses are also found.Italian examples in（8）, French examples in（9）and German examples in（10）:

（8）a.Considero Jim（come）un insegnante.

I consider Jim（as）a teacher.

b.Considero Mary（come）una insegnante.

I consider Mary（as）a teacher.

c.Li considero（come）insegnanti.

I consider them（as）teachers.

（9）a.Je considère Jim comme un enseignant.

I consider Jim as a teacher.

b.Je considère Marie comme une enseignante

I consider Mary as a teacher.

c.Je les considère comme des enseignants.

I consider them as teachers.

（10）a.Ich betrachte Jim als Lehrer.

I consider Jim as a teacher.

b.Ich betrachte Mary als Lehrerin.

I consider Mary as a teacher.

c.Ich betrachte sie als Lehrer.

I consider them as teachers.

In French and German, there is no such bare nominative small clauses without particle comme/come.With this distributional advantage, we unavoidably come to the question that whether these as/come/comme constituents indeed help case-mark the following predicate.And what syntactic role does it play in small clauses or does it function more semantically? The answer to these questions may shed some light on the research and help us look into the syntactic and semantic functions of this adverb and nominative small clauses.

Third, with the previous distribution advantage, we may assume nominative small clauses with as should be more general and acceptable.But it is not the case.In the acceptability questionnaire, nominative small clauses with as in it shows no higher acceptability than bare nominative small clauses as expected.In fact, the averag e score of nominative small clause with as is 2.1, lower than that of bare nominative small clauses 2.9.This result leads to a confusing contradiction with the cross-linguistic distribution gap of bare nominative small clause and the one with as in it.

Last but not the least, the selection of main verbs influences the distribution of nominative small clauses.The constituent called“small clause”was originally identified as the complement of consider-type verbs（Moro, 1997:262）.Other consider-type verbs like believe and think can also select small clause as the complement but present some distributional difference. Look at sentences in（11）and（12）:

（11）a.I believe John innocent.

b.I believe John in the park.

c.? I believe John a teacher.

d.∗I believe John as a teacher.

（12）a.I think John innocent.

b.I think John in the park.

c.∗I think John a teacher.

d.∗I think John as a teacher.

（11）and（12）show that believe and think can select small clauses with AP or PP predicates but not small clauses with NP predicates.This is also proved in the acceptability questionnaire.While nominative small clauses selected by consider are ranked as“just acceptable”, those selected by believe and think are ranked approaching“not acceptable at all”with an average score of 1.19.All the three words, consider, believe, and think are categorized as psych cognitive verbs, expressing static cognition activities.And they bear the same theta-grid as in（13）:

（13）

Semantically, they can assign a theta role of theme to the small clause, and syntactically, they can select a small clause as the complement.It goes so well when they select small clauses with AP or PP predicate but becomes problematic when it comes to NP predicate.Compared with AP and PP counterparts, the most prominent feature of NP predicate is that overt NPs need to be case-licensed.So what semantic or syntactic features of the main verb lead to this difference?