The Grammar of Copulas Across Languages

by Maria J. Arche, Antonio Fabregas, Rafael Marin

Overview

This volume presents a crosslinguistic survey of the current theoretical debates around copular constructions from a generative perspective. Following an introduction to the main questions surrounding the analysis and categorization of copulas, the chapters address a range of key topics including the existence of more than one copular form in certain languages, the factors determining the presence or absence of a copula, and the morphology of copular forms. The team of expert contributors present new theoretical proposals regarding the formal mechanisms behind the behaviour and patterns observed in copulas in a wide range of typologically diverse languages, including Czech, French, Korean, and languages from the Dene and Bantu families. Their findings have implications beyond the study of copulas and shed more light on issues such as agreement relations, the nature of grammatical categories, and nominal predicates in syntax and semantics.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780198829850
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	05/01/2019
Series:	Oxford Studies in Theoretical Linguistics
Pages:	306
Product dimensions:	9.30(w) x 6.40(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Maria J. Arche is Associate Professor of Linguistics & Spanish at the University of Greenwich. Her research focuses on the syntax and semantics of tense and aspect and their acquisition. She is the author of Individuals in Time: Tense, Aspect and the Individual/Stage Distinction (Benjamins, 2006) and co-editor of The Grammar Dimension in Instructed Second Language Learning (Bloomsbury, 2013), and has edited special issues of Natural Language and Linguistic Theory and Lingua on aspect and argument structure.

Antonio Fabregas is Full Professor of Hispanic Linguistics at the University of Tromso - The Arctic University of Norway. His research concentrates on the syntax and semantics of word-internal structures, with particular attention to grammatical categories, aspect and tense, and the properties of affixes. He is the co-author of Morphology: From Data to Theories (Edinburgh University Press, 2012) and co-editor of Contemporary Linguistic Parameters (Bloomsbury, 2015).

Rafael Marin is Researcher in Linguistics at the STL laboratory, CNRS / Universite de Lille 3. His work focuses on lexical aspect and related phenomena. He has mainly worked on non-verbal predication (adjectives and participles, copular constructions), psychological predicates, and morphology-semantics interface. Since 2016, he has been the Director of the Catalan Foundation for Research and Innovation.

Table of Contents

1. Main questions in the study of copulas: Categories, structures and operations, Maria J. Arche, Antonio Fabregas, and Rafael Marin2. Copulas and light verbs as spellouts of argument structure: Evidence from Dene languages, Nicholas Welch3. The support copula in the left periphery, Teresa O'Neill4. The copula as a nominative case marker, Kwang-sup Kim5. Number matching in binomial small clauses, Susana Bejar, Jessica Denniss, Arsalan Kahnemuyipour, and Tomohiro Yokoyama6. Agreement with the post-verbal DP in Polish dual copula clauses, Anna Bondaruk7. On person, animacy, and copular agreement in Czech, Jitka Bartošova and Ivona Kučerova8. Aspects of the syntax of ce in French copular sentences, Isabelle Roy and Ur Shlonsky9. The role of the copula in the periphrastic passives in Russian, Olga Borik10. The copula in certain Caribbean Spanish focus constructions, Luis Saez11. Variation in Bantu copula constructions, Hannah Gibson, Rozenn Guerois, and Lutz Marten12. Predicational and specificational copular sentences in Logoori, Nicoletta LoccioniReferences

Editorial Reviews

"The Grammar of Copulas across Languages is a valuable addition to the literature on copulas...Reading this book was rewarding to me, and I believe it is capable of informing new works in this challenging field." — Aroldo Leal de Andrade, Universidade Federal De Minas Gerais (UFMG), Linguist List

From the Publisher