Copular sentences like (1) may appear straightforward; they are certainly common. (1) The person I most wanted to meet was Tom Lehrer. Particularly since the work of Higgins 1979, however, it has become clear that sentences like (1), together with pseudoclefts like (2), to which they are intimately related, pose challenging questions to our understanding of linguistic representations. (2) What I was hoping for was his autograph. In this paper we will indicate briefly what is at issue, discuss in passing some recent contributions to understanding the problem, and then concentrate on one aspect that we believe is essential to understanding what is happening: the information structure of such sentences. This aspect of specificational sentences was argued to be important in Heycock and Kroch 1999, but only partially integrated into the analysis presented there; in this paper we attempt to go further in developing an account in which the role of information structure is central.