Copula Verbs

5 Key excerpts on "Copula Verbs"

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  The Japanese Copula

  Forms and Functions

  • T. Narahara(Author)
  • 2002(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  The most common definition of ‘copula’ found in dictionaries and in the literature of linguistics as well as in philosophy and logic is as follows: (1) A definition of ‘copula’ A word that links a subject and a predicate. The term predicate is an ambiguous notion. The predicate used in (1) does not include the copula itself by its very definition. Syntacticians specify the category of ‘predicate’ in the definition in the following way, as exemplified by Radford (1997): (2) A definition of ‘copula’ A verb used to link a subject with a non-verbal predicate. Radford defines verb as follows: (3) A definition of ‘verb’ A category of word which has the morphological property that can carry a range of inflections including past tense. The non-verbal predicates, therefore, are those that do not inflect. In English, non-verbal predicates are nominal as well as adjectival categories, while in many other languages, including Japanese, only 16 The Concept of the Copula nominals are found in the non-inflecting category. The following English and Japanese examples illustrate the difference: (4)a. That was a French film. b. The film was interesting. (5)a. are wa huransu no eega dat-ta that TOP French GEN movie COP-PS ‘That was a French film.’ b. eega wa omosirokat-ta movie TOP interesting-PS ‘The film was interesting.’ In (5a), the copula expresses the past tense with -ta glossed as PS, while in (5b), the adjective expresses the tense by encoding the past tense morpheme -ta in its inflected form. I will refer to the nominal and adjective in the sentence type (5) as predicative nominal and predicative adjective respectively. I will refer to sentences containing a predicative nominal such as (5a) as nominal sentences regardless of the assumed categorial status of the copula in a given language. Likewise I will refer to sentences containing a predicative adjective as adjectival sentences. English adjectival sentences are like nominal sentences in that they require a copula.

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  Cognitive Linguistics in the Redwoods

  The Expansion of a New Paradigm in Linguistics

  • Eugene H. Casad(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  What are Copula Verbs? Bruce Horton 0. Introduction It has long been apparent to certain descriptive linguists (e.g. Quirk et al. 1985: 90 passim) that the traditional classification of words into word classes ignores intermediate positions between two categories of description. Langacker (1987: 14ff) has written at length about the difficulty of using sharply dichotomous (criteria-attribute) models when categorizing gradient phenomena, which could more accu-rately be depicted with a prototype model. This paper investigates a particular grammatical category, that of Copula Verbs, and shows that class membership is not an all-or-noth-ing affair but is rather a matter of degree. We discuss the gradient run-ning between action verb and copula constructions in English and show how various verbs approach the prototypical copula usage to varying degrees. We find that it is difficult to distinguish between copula and noncopula constructions in any absolute way, for the deci-sion about what is and what is not a copula depends upon where one wishes to draw the lines. As a practical, working taxonomy, we pro-pose a gradient ranging from noncopula look-a-likes, to quasi cop-ula constructions, to true copulas. All borderlines are fuzzy. 1. Prototypical copula usage There is little question about what constitutes prototypical copula us-age in English. The following syntactic and semantic tests would seem to be nearly universally accepted by those who have investigated the topic. 320 Bruce Horton 1.1. Syntactic characteristics A copula is a verb followed by a special grammatical category, one usually called a predicate (which is said to function as a subject complement). Predicates are most characteristically made up of a predicate adjective (Joe is tall ) or a predicate nominal (Joe is a liar), but the predicate may be composed of other elements, such as a predi-cate prepositional phrase ( Joe's in trouble), among others.

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  The Diachrony of Verb Meaning

  Aspect and Argument Structure

  • Elly van Gelderen(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  There is some debate as to what counts as a copula; e.g. Lyons (1977: 471) defines it as a “meaningless lexeme” and includes only the neutral ‘be’. I will use a broader definition that includes copulas with shades of modal, e.g. ‘seem’, and aspectual, e.g. ‘remain’, meanings. Although these meanings might imply reanalysis as auxiliary verb, that is not the case, as I show. My definition of a copula is a structural one: linking a DP, AP, or PP to a DP in subject position, assigning a Theme role to the latter, and adding modal and aspectual meanings. One could think of it as a light verb, responsible for a certain Theta-role.

  Many possible structures for copulas have been suggested (for instance, Higgins 1979; Rothstein 1995; Moro 2000; Hoekstra 2004, Mikkelsen 2005, and den Dikken 2006). Frequent analyses involve a small clause, i.e. one without a verb, as in (1). Den Dikken has argued that the Small Clause is Relator Phrase, headed by a relator head, as in (2).

  Another structural representation of a copula involves a Pred(icate)Phrase (Bowers 1993), the head of which is involved in theta-marking of the Theme that bears the grammatical subject role. Baker (2003) argues that the Pred makes the predicative function of nouns and adjectives possible. I will be using the PredP, as in (3), since it is the most transparent about theta-roles.

  Many languages, e.g. Arabic, allow zero copulas in generic situations. When past or future needs to be added, the copula appears. In cases like these, it can be argued that the copula is in T. I will not consider zero copulas here.

  3 Changing Copulas

  In this section, I will provide data on the verbs that function as copulas in the various stages of English (section 3.1). I will then examine changes inside the paradigm of the verb ‘to be’ (section 3.2) and the sources of Modern English copulas (section 3.3). As we’ll see, the Old English copula ‘be’ can be marked for mood but this is later taken over by specialized copulas.

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  Semantics - Sentence and Information Structure

  • Paul Portner, Claudia Maienborn, Klaus von Heusinger, Paul Portner, Claudia Maienborn, Klaus von Heusinger(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110589863-007 Line Mikkelsen 7 Copular clauses 1 Introduction 250 2 A taxonomy of copular clauses 252 3 The meaning(s) of the copula 261 4 Connectivity 265 5 Conclusion 277 6 References 278 Abstract: This article provides an overview of research on copular clauses, focus-sing on three questions. First, how many types of copular clauses there are, second, what meaning is contributed by the copula, and third, what so-called connectivity effects tell us about the structure of copular clauses. 1 Introduction Copular clauses are a minor sentence type in which the contentful predicate is not a verb, but some other category like AP, NP or PP. In some languages there is no verbal element at all in these clauses; in other languages there is a verbal copula joining the subject and the non-verbal element. Copular clauses (of the verbal and of the non-verbal kind) come in a great variety of forms and intui-tively seem to express different kinds of information. The English examples in (1) provide a first illustration of the range of variation. (1) a. Emily is a carpenter. b. What Harvey did next was wash himself thoroughly. c. Electronically is usually fastest. (Partee 1986: (5g)) d. That’s my brother. e. Red is my favorite color. f. My favorite color is red. g. The only thing we couldn’t agree on was whether we should go to France first. Line Mikkelsen, Berkeley, CA, USA 7 Copular clauses 251 This article is structured around three central questions in the investigation of copular clauses. The first question, which I will call the taxonomy question, is how many kinds of copular clauses there are. Intuitively the copular clauses in (1) are different in various respects (and the list could easily be expanded) and the taxonomy question is whether any of these differences are significant enough to posit distinct types of copular clauses and if so, which types exist.

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  Crucial Readings in Functional Grammar

  • Matthew P. Anstey, J. Lachlan Mackenzie, Matthew P. Anstey, J. Lachlan Mackenzie(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  In English, this applies to the verbs be and become, the latter with an inchoative operator on the (f,) variable. (For an examination of another pair of copulas, Castilian Spanish ser and estar and their cognates in other Iberian languages, see Hengeveld 1998. Moreover, not all copulas are verbal, as described for various languages in Hengeveld 1992). Copulas should furthermore be distinguished from 'light verbs', which Baron and Herslund (1998) attribute to predicate formation. In a similar vein, the status of grammatical predicates is raised by Olbertz (1998) in her monograph on (semi-)auxiliaries in dialects of Spanish and Goossens (1992) likewise raises the issue of 'graded predicationality'. Van Schaaik (2001) examines similar phenomena in Turkish. Keizer deviates from traditional FG in assuming that nouns and adjectives have no valency in the lexicon, whereas Dik (1989) shows them as having one, or in the case of a relational predicate, two arguments. Her position was developed and extended to nominalizations by Mackenzie (1994, 1997), 138 Matthew P. Anstey and J. Lachlan Mackenzie while in Dik (1997a: 63) the resultant representations are accepted and imple-mented, but only as a simplified notation: the valency of nouns and adjectives in retained in the lexicon. In more recent work in Functional Discourse Grammar (Hengeveld 2004) this issue has been resolved, in the sense that no predicate has valency in the lexicon, the arguments being attributed by the 'formulator'. Keizer's article, building on her doctoral thesis (Keizer 1992), proposes a novel representation for identifying constructions which deviates from that assumed by Dik (1997a, 1997b) and by Hengeveld (1992).

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