Abstract

This paper addresses specificational clauses, observed from a syntactic, semantic, lexical and textual perspective. The study draws on passages from real texts, particularly from academic prose. The preverbal noun is argued to be a predicate and not a subject; it often encodes information related to the logical-argumentative level and cognitive and metatextual aspects. Due to preverbal nouns, the conceptual category to which the postverbal subject belongs is presented as the starting point of the sentence. This mechanism allows for a strong cohesion, displaying an informative given-new progression