The rise of a functional category in small clauses

. This paper argues for the rise of a functional category Pred(ication) in the sense of Bowers (1993) in the history of English by investigating the distribution of as, floating quantifiers, expletive it, and inversion of subjects and predicates in small clauses. The results of this investigation reveal that evidence for the presence of Pred in small clauses began to be attested in the fourteenth century. This indicates that they have undergone a change from the structure headed by a lexical category to the structure headed by Pred, which is shown to have been completed during the eighteenth century.