The Grammar of Copulas Across Languages
María J. Arche, Antonio Fábregas, and Rafael Marín
Abstract
Copular verbs and copular sentences have been for many years a central issue in the theoretical discussions about the nature of (light) verbs and other grammatical categories, the ingredients of predication structures, the properties of nominal categories, agreement, and the interaction between syntax and semantics at the level of clause structure. The current research on copulas has gone beyond the investigation of what kind of objects they are, and has implications for the nature of agreement and other formal processes in syntax and morphology, as well as proposals about the types of structu ... More
Copular verbs and copular sentences have been for many years a central issue in the theoretical discussions about the nature of (light) verbs and other grammatical categories, the ingredients of predication structures, the properties of nominal categories, agreement, and the interaction between syntax and semantics at the level of clause structure. The current research on copulas has gone beyond the investigation of what kind of objects they are, and has implications for the nature of agreement and other formal processes in syntax and morphology, as well as proposals about the types of structure building operations available in natural languages, the types of features that lexical selection is sensitive to, and the possibility that languages have access to semantically-empty elements required for the satisfaction of purely formal properties. The twelve works included in this volume illustrate the state of the art of these discussions through the analysis of detailed patterns of data from a variety of languages.
Keywords:
copulas,
predication,
agreement,
clause structure,
syntax–semantics interface,
grammatical categories
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2019 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780198829850 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: March 2019 |
DOI:10.1093/oso/9780198829850.001.0001 |
Authors
Affiliations are at time of print publication.
María J. Arche, editor
Senior Lecturer in Linguistics and Spanish, University of Greenwich
Antonio Fábregas, editor
Professor of Hispanic Linguistics, University of Tromsø - The Arctic University of Norway
Rafael Marín, editor
Researcher in Linguistics, CNRS/University of Lille
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