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In:The Ziggurat of Grammar: In honor of Ur Shlonsky
Edited by Lena Baunaz, Giuliano Bocci and Andrew Nevins
[Language Faculty and Beyond 20] 2025
► pp. 356–380

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Chapter 17
What’s in a copula?

On the lightness of being

ORCiD logo with link | Nantes Université / LLING, CNRS
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.

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Published online: 13 November 2025
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https://doi.org/10.1075/lfab.20.17roy
Abstract
This paper is a contribution to the debate on the nature and role of copulas in nonverbal predication. The aim is to provide a comprehensive analysis of copulas that takes into account the diversity of forms copulas may take across languages (verbal copula, particle copula, absence of copula). Contrary to the widely accepted view that copulas are support elements for tense, aspect and mood (TAM), in the proposed analysis the copula is analyzed as the realization of the head Pred, with or without accompanying TAM projections. Variation in the form of the copula, as well as its absence altogether, derives from how Pred and TAM heads are morphologically realized: as a single exponent, as separate exponents, or not realized.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Puzzles with copulas
    • 2.1Copulas in nonverbal predication
    • 2.2Verbs and particles
    • 2.4Multiple-copula systems
    • 2.5‘Zero’-copula
    • 2.6Mixed strategy systems
    • 2.7Interim summary
  • 3.Copulas: The lightness of being
    • 3.1Pred
    • 3.2Mixed systems revisited
  • 4.Beyond predication
    • 4.1Further types of copular sentences
    • 4.2(Pro)form element
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • List of abbreviations
  • References
References (65)
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