Higgins (1973) famously distinguished between predicational and specificational interpretations of copular sentences. Since then, the literature has debated whether specificational interpretations exist and, if so, what they are. This paper contributes to this debate by providing three new arguments for recognizing specificational interpretations, and against the view, prevalent in the syntactic literature, that sentences with allegedly specificational readings actually involve predicational readings and a structure of predicate inversion. Our arguments support Romero’s (2005) analysis of specificational readings as involving individual concepts. Our discussion also demonstrates that the question of the semantics of specification is entirely independent of the question of whether the syntax of specification involves inversion or not.

中文翻译：

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规范句个别概念分析的三个论证

Higgins (1973) 以区分连词句的谓语解释和规范解释而著称。从那时起，文献一直在争论规范解释是否存在，如果存在，它们是什么。本文通过提供三个新论点来促进这一辩论，以识别规范解释，并反对句法文献中普遍存在的观点，即所谓的规范阅读的句子实际上涉及谓语阅读和谓词倒置的结构。我们的论点支持罗梅罗 (2005) 对涉及个别概念的规范阅读的分析。我们的讨论还表明，规范的语义问题完全独立于规范的语法是否涉及倒置的问题。