ABSTRACT
The following sentence, uttered with neutral intonation (that is, with no focus intonation—see the end of the snippet) stands out as a puzzle for syntactic theory:
*pro è [ [una foto del muro] [la causa della rivolta] ] (pro is a picture of the wall the cause of the riot)
In a pro-drop language like Italian, pro-insertion as an alternative to DP raising should make the sentence grammatical as in the case of passives and unaccusatives satisfying the EPP. The copula, instead, requires raising of either the subject (una foto del muro) or the predicate DP (la causa della rivolta), yielding a canonical (2a) or an inverse (2b) copular sentence (in the sense of Moro 1997, 2000):[una foto del muro] è [ t [la causa della rivolta]] (a picture of the wall is the cause of the riot)
[la causa della rivolta] è [[una foto del muro] t ] (the cause of the riot is a picture of the wall)
