31.1361, Review: Morphology; Semantics; Syntax; Typology: Arche, Fabregas, Marin (2019)

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Subject: 31.1361, Review: Morphology; Semantics; Syntax; Typology: Arche, Fabregas, Marin (2019)

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Date: Wed, 15 Apr 2020 16:07:07
From: Aroldo de Andrade [aroldo.andrade at gmail.com]
Subject: The Grammar of Copulas Across Languages

 
Discuss this message:
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/30/30-1859.html

EDITOR: Maria J. Arche
EDITOR: Antonio  Fabregas
EDITOR: Rafael  Marin
TITLE: The Grammar of Copulas Across Languages
SERIES TITLE: Oxford Studies in Theoretical Linguistics
PUBLISHER: Oxford University Press
YEAR: 2019

REVIEWER: Aroldo Leal de Andrade, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG), Brazil

INTRODUCTION

This is a book with twelve chapters, representing a selection of talks given
at the Workshop ‘Copulas Across Languages’ held at the University of Greenwich
in June 2015.

SUMMARY

The twelve contributions are organized according to broad topic types,
starting with the ‘nature of copulas’ (Chapters Two to Four), then passing
through chapters on ‘formal operations that copular structures can inform’
(Chapters Five to Eight) and finishing with ‘structures where copulas appear’
(Chapters Nine to Twelve). Nevertheless, these topics are not shown as parts
of the book. The first chapter is an introduction to the whole volume. 

Chapter One (“Main questions in the study of copulas: categories, structures,
and operations”), written by the volume organizers María J. Arche, Antonio
Fábregas, and Rafael Marín, presents the main topics related to the study of
copulas, followed by an overview of the chapters. They point out three core
issues in the analysis of copulas:

-the nature of grammatical categories expressing copulas (most proposals
assume that they are support elements merely denoting formal features)
-the working of agreement, phi and EPP (movement) features
-the contribution of copulas to defining the type of clause, such as
predicational and specificational clauses, or informationally-marked
constructions clefts and passives.

Interesting research topics discussed in several papers consist in the
existence of different types of copulas in the same language (i.e. pronominal
and verbal copulas) and contexts for copula omission. 

In Chapter Two (“Copulas and light verbs as spellouts of argument structure:
Evidence from Dene languages”), Nicholas Welch proposes that copulas are
purely phonological spellouts of morphosyntactic structure, being very similar
to light verbs. In other words, copulas have little or so semantic content.
Welch then presents the different types of copulas in two Dene (Athapaskan)
languages, roughly translated as different types of little v’s, some encoding
individual-level, others, stage-level predicates, others including a Voice
Projection.

Theresa O’Neill analyzes in Chapter Three (“The support copula in the left
periphery”) the main features of Amalgam Specificational Copular (ASC)
sentences, as in a sentence like “That’s her biggest problem, is she can’t
find a job”. According to O’Neill, this non-standard construction displays a
copula as mere support for inflectional morphology. However, the copula is not
inserted into T/Infl, but at the left periphery of the clause, which is the
only clausal domain effectively projected. She argues that the tense form is
fake in view of semantic intuition and experimental data. Inflection is
modelled in terms of phi-feature sharing by downward feature-transmission. In
defence of “be” as the phonetic realization of an elsewhere finiteness
morpheme, the author discusses data from Headlinese, i.e. the grammar found in
newspaper headings, in which the copula is omitted in [-finite] contexts. 

Chapter Four, entitled “The copula as a nominative Case marker” and written by
Kwang-Sup Kim, closes off the group of contributions enquiring into the nature
of copulas. It puts forward a basic tenet: the morpheme “-i” that has been
identified as a copula in Korean is in fact the realization of Nominative
Case. The main argument shows that these items are phonologically identical,
and are subject the same distributional restrictions (for instance, in some
negative sentences and in structures compatible with delimiters such as “–man”
(‘only’) and “–(n)un” (‘too’). For Kim, this idea has been hindered by the
fact that in Korean there may be multiple case assignment, especially whenever
a nominal predicate is present. In order to show this, he presents a series of
evidence against previous approaches, and discusses apparent counterexamples. 
He closes the text by presenting the thematic structures of copular
constructions, i.e. referentiality statuses and theta-role assignment of
different nouns in various types of sentences. 

In Chapter Five (“Number matching in binominal small clauses”), Susana Bejar,
Jessica Denniss, Arsalan Kahnemuyipour, and Tomohiro Yokohama investigate
binominal small clauses. In many of these, the predicate agreement features
seem to depend on those of the subject, in a sort of covariation, as
illustrated in “Mary is {a violinist / *violinists} in two orchestras,”
although the number matching requirement is not found in other examples, whose
interpretation depends on the context. The authors consider the requirement to
apply as a consequence of Merge Concord, an operation that involves copying
the value of a shared feature between two elements undergoing Merge. The
contexts in which no concord is enforced are said to be the reflex of the
structure of the DP: too small, i.e. lacking functional structure (bare
nouns); too big, so that the number feature on D becomes inaccessible (shell
nouns, which refer to a proposition); or with a referential second DP, in
which the number feature is valued DP-internally. 

Chapter Six (“Agreement with the post-verbal DP in Polish dual copula
clauses”) by Anna Bondaruk, entertains a proposal for a noticeable fact in
Polish: clauses with two copulas (one pronominal and one verbal) differ from
those with just one copula, in that verbal agreement takes place with the
postverbal DP (cf. page 108):

(i) Ci zawodnicy to {była /*byli} drużyną piłkarską.
these players-NOM.3PL.VIRILE {was-3SG.F /*were-VIRILE} team-NOM.3SG.F football
‘These players are a football team.’

Dual copula sentences may occur in the two main types of copular constructions
(predicational and specificational). The verbal copula may be dropped only in
the present tense of specificational sentences, which are usually conveyed by
a pronominal copula. If the copular sentence includes a 1st or 2nd person
pronoun, the verb must agree with it, no matter its position. Bondaruk
proposes that the pronominal copula “to” is a reflex of a Pred head, whereas
the verbal copula is placed in v. The preverbal DP moves to Spec,TP due to T’s
EPP feature. Evidence that this is an A-position comes from binding and
negative polarity items. This movement occurs, in apparent violation to
locality, due to complete feature valuation between T and the DP, also
involving a Topic feature (Mikkelsen 2005). She also posits that there is
Multiple Agree in dual copula clauses for phi-feature valuation, which occurs
independently from EPP satisfaction. 

In Chapter Seven, entitled “On PERSON, animacy, and copular agreement in
Czech,” Jitka Bartošová and Ivona Kučerová develop a case study of copular
clauses with two Nominative DPs. The authors show that Czech grammar imposes a
restriction on gender matching if one of these Nominative DPs is a pronoun.
For instance, if the topic such as ‘a nice man’ is available in the context,
the copula must be inflected for masculine, not feminine gender (cf. page
132): 

(ii) #Byla to zdravotní sestra.
was.F.SG to health sister.F.SG
Intended: ‘He (=the nice man) was a nurse.’

The authors show that the pronoun corresponds to the subject of predication
and that it is phi-feature deficient. Verbal agreement may occur either with
the DP subject of predication or with the DP predicate. In the latter case,
the gender of the antecedent of “to”  must match the gender of the DP
predicate. In order for this to occur, the antecedent must be animate.
Similarly to the previous chapter, Multiple Agree is adopted as a way to
ensure feature valuation. This system becomes more evident in sentences with a
compound tense (in the past), because the participle agrees in gender with the
DP predicate. The restriction on gender matching is derived from a
presupposition on the syntax-semantics interface which dialogues partially
with the proposed system: if the pronoun “to” has an animate antecedent, it
will be marked [+person], thus inheriting the presupposition associated with
the gender feature in the Multiple-Agree chain. The chapter finishes with a
discussion on clauses with DPs marked with Instrumental case, and their
restriction to clauses having reference to a proposition.

Chapter Eight (“Aspects of the syntax of ‘ce’ in French copular sentences”),
by Isabelle Roy and Ur Shlonsky, includes a cartographic analysis for the
distribution of “ce” in French clefts. They question the relevance of Higgins’
(1973) classification of copular sentences and propose instead that the
distribution of “ce” is structurally conditioned, in that it is connected to
the fact that the post-copular nominal is focalized, as in (cf. page 155):

(iii) Jean c’est mon meilleur ami.  
Jean CE-is my best friend
‘Jean is my best friend.’

They adopt Belletti’s (2001) low focus position (at the vP periphery) as the
projection hosting the focused constituent. Besides, the idea of a ‘subject of
predication’ in line with Cardinaletti (1997) is considered as the position of
the pre-copular DP. Unlike in Cardinaletti’s work, two subject positions above
TP are considered, and “ce” is said to merge at the specifier of the lower
one, as an expletive pronoun. The movement of the pre-copular DP occurs after
the movement of the predication phrase PredP to a position between the two
subject projections. A similar solution is applied to inverse (i.e.
specificational) copular constructions, in which “ce” is obligatorily used.
Regarding adjectival predicates, Danon’s (2012) approach for the pronominal
copula “ze” in Hebrew, according to which the DP phi-features are invisible
for agreement, is adopted. Yet, they suggest (similarly to what is said in
Chapter 5 regarding shell nouns) that the DP structure becomes more complex as
a consequence of shifting definite descriptions into abstractions over
individuals, worlds, and situations, thus hindering access to these
phi-features. This chapter is the last one on the topic ‘formal operations
that copular constructions can inform’. 

In Chapter Nine (“The role of the copula in periphrastic passives in
Russian”), Olga Borik analyzes the semantic effects related to the presence or
absence of the copula in Russian passive sentences. According to previous
work, without the copula, the relevant clauses show a present interpretation,
whereas with it, a past interpretation arises. The author questions this idea,
together with the proposal embodied in Paslawska & von Stechow’s (2003) work,
who put forward that the absence of the copula could serve as a diagnostic for
stative/adjectival passives in this language. She equally questions their
proposal of a Result Parameter related the to this variation. In order to
develop her counterargument, Borik demonstrates that ‘present tense’ passives
can be both stative and eventive; besides, some Greek data, a language
potentially similar to Russian according to the Result Parameter, are shown to
be inconclusive regarding the relation between adjectival passives and the
eventive interpretation. She then presents a fine semantic characterization
for past participle passives in Russian, so as to show that no relevant
interpretative differences are to be found between zero and overt copulas.
Both state and event modifiers can be found in the same sentence, but the
former may occur in either low or high position of the clausal spine. A piece
of evidence in this direction consists in the placement of temporal modifiers,
which is meant to reflect their attachment place. Finally, Borik suggests that
the distinction between stative and eventive passives may be marked in the
form of the participle in Russian, more specifically by long forms such as
“narisovannyj” (‘painted’), instead of “narisovan”. 

In Chapter Ten (“The copula in certain Caribbean Spanish focus constructions”)
by Luis Sáez, the discussion is centered on a focus construction involving
just the inclusion of a copula (cf. page 191):

(iv) Juan compró fue UN LIBRO.
Juan bought.3SG was.3SG a book.FOCUS
‘It was a book that Juan bought.’

The author presents his proposal for this construction, according to which the
copula pertains to a cleft, the whole construction being related to another
one known as a Horn Amalgam, discussed in Lakoff (1974): “John is going to I
think it is Chicago”. He follows Kluck (2011) in assuming that two clauses,
the first of which includes a variable, are joined by Parenthetical Merge: (a)
”John is going to e.” and (b) ”I think [it is CHICAGO that John is going
to.]”. In this structure, the variable ‘e’ is licensed by co-reference with
the clefted DP “Chicago”. The difference with respect to the Spanish
construction at hand is that the second, interrupting clause is a cleft. Sáez
then compares his own approach to previous ones, in terms of predictions and
shortcomings. He completely dismisses proposals relating the construction
either to a biclausal structure with a reduced pseudocleft, or to a
monoclausal structure with the copula as a focus-marker. Sáez considers that
Camacho’s (2006) proposal, according to which the copula heads an equative
copular clause base-generated as an adjunct of the VP including the main verb,
is better than previous ones; yet he shows that it makes wrong predictions
regarding the type of focus, which is indeed exhaustive according to the tests
in Kiss (1998). Lastly, Sáez comments in passing on two proposals intended to
explain a very similar construction found in Brazilian Portuguese, and
suggests that his proposal for Spanish is applicable to this grammar as well.

Chapter Eleven (“Variation in Bantu copula constructions”), by Hannah Gibson,
Rozenn Guérois, and Lutz Marten, presents a comparative study on
micro-variation in copula expression, drawing on a range of Bantu languages.
Copulas may be expressed by invariant or inflected construction, by tonal
marking (more specifically by tone lowering or deletion), or simple omission.
In the second part of the chapter, the authors present a more systematic case
study on five languages, noticeably Mongo, Rangi, Digo, Swahili, and Cuwabo,
now discussing restrictions on the interpretation and distribution of copulas.
Different languages use distinct expressive forms in predicative, possessive,
locative and negative contexts, with varying distribution. Another studied
aspect is whether copulas in some languages are compatible with distinct
tense-aspect interpretations or not (in this case being determined solely by
the context). Finally, different copula forms are analyzed according to their
combinatorial properties, in terms of following categories. For instance, in
Makhuwa, Predicate (tonal) Lowering can be used with nouns but not with
personal and demonstrative pronouns, among other categories, in which the
overt invariable copula “ti” must be used instead (examples from van der Wal
2009:122 on page 232):

(v) a. nakhúku 
‘crow’
b. Mwaánúni ulánakhukú.
‘This bird is a crow.’

After these descriptive sections, the authors end the chapter by discussing
some restrictions derived from comparative and theoretical implications, which
are used to present a sketch of a formal proposal for Swahili copulas. 

In Chapter Twelve, entitled “Predicational and specificational copular
sentences in Logoori,” Nicoletta Loccioni describes the distribution of a
copular alternation in Logoori, a Bantu language spoken in Kenya with one
invariant form (“ne”) and an agreeing form (“kuva”). While the two forms can
be found in predicational clauses, only “ne” is accepted in identificational
and specificational clauses; and only “kuva” is accepted in locative,
temporal, existential or possessive clauses. After descriptively presenting
other properties of the two copulas, Loccioni proposes a formal analysis for
their distribution, around the assumption of a PredP projection. For her,
“kuva” is the spellout of a raising verb selecting PredP which is incorporated
to T, whereas “ne” corresponds to a functional head at the left periphery that
allows dislocation, either of the subject of predication, or of its nucleus.
Her proposal concentrates on the difference between specificational and
predicational clauses. This chapter is the last one of the book, and closes
off the group of texts dealing with the topic ‘structures where copulas
appear’.

The book also includes a references list for all the contributions and an
index of terms and languages. 

EVALUATION 

The Grammar of Copulas across Languages is a valuable addition to the
literature on copulas. It achieves the goal of providing “a crosslinguistic
survey of the theoretical debates around copular constructions from a
generative perspective”, as stated in the back cover. Besides, it shows a good
transition between its chapters, despite its origin as an organized volume.
Although some readers will search for individual contributions, the reading of
Chapter One is especially recommended as a nice summary of the basic questions
regarding the grammar of copulas nowadays.

Although this is primarily a book including generative proposals, the title
emphasizes its typological aspect. I believe this is misleading. Some
unattentive reader may expect to find more detailed comparisons among
languages, and more contributions on underrepresented languages. Although the
volume indeed has some chapters on non-Indo-European languages, these are
limited to three (Chapters One, Eleven and Twelve) out the eleven chapters
with original contributions. Only Chapter Eleven makes a systematic
typological work, and because of that it barely has a formal proposal for any
specific language. Two chapters are exclusively dedicated to English, and the
other six, either to Romance or Slavic languages. Notwithstanding that, there
are indeed individual efforts to make comparisons with other languages, and I
believe this misrepresentation is not a problem per se, because the
theoretical works are indeed valuable, and have a good potential of being
replicated to other languages.

A related comment regards how books on generative syntax could make better
usage of comparisons. First, by observing the implications of a proposal
(originally tailored for a specific language) for other languages. Second, by
making clear comparisons of close languages. Third, by identifying topics for
further research from a typological work, without the intention of presenting
a very theoretically profound study. I believe that, while most of the
chapters in this book conform to the two first types of contributions, the
latter one is also very valuable. I was glad that this book included Gibson,
Guérois, and Marten’s paper (Chapter Eleven) because it can provide a first
exploration of topics to be discussed in future works dedicated to
underrepresented (or endangered) languages. Yet, the discussion could
concentrate only on morphosyntactic aspects in the expression of copulas,
because tonal lowering alone is too complex, empirically and theoretically, to
be compared to other phenomena. Regarding this issue, the type of category
involved in the lowering (in terms of the lexical/functional divide) was not
mentioned as a possible explanation for the mentioned restrictions. 

The value of organized volumes such as these come from the joint effort of
editors, authors and reviewers. I have already mentioned the nice work by the
editors; surely the reviewers have also done a great job, since almost no
serious mistake or typo was found throughout the book. Nevertheless, there are
indeed some obscure points in some proposals, which could be made clear by a
discussion on whether their crosslinguistic implications are indeed tenable:

- in Bejar, Denniss, Kahnemuyipour, and Yokohama’s paper (Chapter Five), it is
said that the operation Merge Concord applies only for number features, but no
word is said regarding languages with gender marking, in which it is not clear
whether the same restrictions on the application of Merge Concord would take
place;
- in Roy and Shlonsky’s paper (Chapter Eight), the two subject projections in
“ce” sentences are said to be non-adjacent and above TP, but there are grounds
to believe that no constituent may appear between the preverbal DP and “ce”;
- in Loccioni’s paper (Chapter Twelve), there is no account for the fact that
the definite meaning of DPs is found only with the invariant copula (“ne”).

Another issue that comes along from reading the entire volume regards
incompatibilities between the proposals that could be thought over. Of course,
it is not mandatory from an organized volume to have such level of internal
coherence (some of these different assumptions have indeed been pointed out by
the editors themselves), but I take the opportunity to present some other
issues that were not mentioned in the introductory chapter. First, some papers
(as Chapter Five) assume a more traditional approach for copular
constructions, involving a Small Clause at the base of the structure; most
papers, though, assume that predication takes place in an X-bar schema
involving a projection such as PredP. It is not clear to me that all proposals
would fare well with either one or the other structure. Second, the
distinction on pronominal and verbal copulas does not seem to be independently
motivated. Pronominal copulas may be: a case marker (Chapter Four), a support
category expressing a functional projection (Chapter Six), or indeed a nominal
element inside a DP (Chapters Seven and Eight). Does this mean that
variability in formal characterizations is to be accepted (perhaps even
expected, if these elements result of distinct grammaticalization processes)
or is it possible to make a classification on formal grounds? These types of
questions could inform further investigations on these more basic topics
related to copulas and the constructions they appear in.

Notwithstanding possible improvements that some of the papers could have, I
believe this book is definitely to be recommended to generative linguists,
especially those dedicated to the study of copulas and related constructions.
Of course, any other reader interested in comparative syntax shall benefit
from the book, provided that s/he is acquainted with some of the basic notions
of syntactic minimalism. Reading this book was rewarding to me, and I believe
it is capable of informing new works in this challenging field. 

REFERENCES

Belletti, Adriana. 2001. Inversion as focalization. In: Aafke Hulk & Jean-Yves
Pollock (eds.) Subject inversion in Romance and the Theory of Universal
Grammar (60-90). Oxford: Oxford University Press. 

Camacho, José. 2006. In situ focus in Caribbean Spanish: Towards a unified
account of focus. In: Nuria Sagarra & Jacqueline Toribio Almeida (eds.)
Selected Proceedings of the 9th Hispanic Linguistics Symposium (13-23).
Sommerville: Cascadilla Proceedings Project. 

Cardinaletti, Anna. 1997. Subjects and clause structure. In: Liliane Haegeman
(ed.) The New Comparative Syntax (33-63). London/New York: Longman.

Danon, Gabi. 2012. Nothing to agree on: Non-agreeing subjects of copular
clauses in Hebrew. Acta Linguistica Hungarica 59:1, 85-108.

Higgins, Roger. 1979. The pseudo-cleft construction in English. New York:
Garland.

Kiss, Katalin É. 1998. Identificational focus versus information focus.
Language 74:2, 245-273.

Kluck, Marlies. 2011. Sentence amalgamation. Doctoral dissertation. Utrecht:
LOT Dissertation Series.

Lakoff, George. 1974. Syntactic amalgams. In: Michael W. La Galy, Robert A.
Fox & Anthony Bruck (eds.) Papers from the 10th Regional Meeting, Chicago
Linguistics Society (321-344). Chicago: Chicago Linguistics Society.

Mikkelsen, Line. 2005. Copular clauses: Specification, predication and
equation. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Palawska, Alla & Arnim von Stechow. 2003. Perfect Readings in Russian. In:
Artemis Alexiadou, Monica Rathert, & Arnim von Stechow (eds.) Perfect
Explorations (307-362). Berlin/New York: de Gruyter.

van der Wal, Jenneke. 2009. Word order and information structure in
Makhua-Enahara. Doctoral dissertation. University of Leiden.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Aroldo L. de Andrade is adjunct professor at the Federal University of Minas
Gerais (UFMG, Brazil). His work focuses nowadays on noncanonical syntactic
constructions, especially clefts and pseudoclefts in Portuguese varieties and
in Romance languages as well. His research interests include syntax,
information structure, discourse structure, and historical linguistics.





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