Those adjectives

[LFG List]

I found Miriam Butt's discussion highly interesting and informative (would
that all linguists could write as well...).  I am not an LFG expert, but I
wonder what would happen if Bengali were taken as the norm, i.e. that
languages more or less characteristically can have null copulas?  This
notion seems to be able to resolve the problem with argument structure
(null copulas have the same argument structure, at least potentially, as
overt copulas), and it solves also the (very messy) problem she pointed out
of needing to have NPs assign argument structure to other NPs, and vice
versa, as in "John is a good teacher" where both "John" and "a good
teacher" must have some such structure.  Further, it offers potential for
accounting also for "small clauses", which have always been unsettling in
some sense (e.g., in P&P, how does case get assigned to all the NPs in
"Experience made [John a good teacher]"?).  If such small clauses also have
a null copula in English, this would be a possible help in this regard
(just like overt "be" must be able to assign abstract case in "John is a
good teacher" null copula can do the same in the small clause), as well as
accounting for why small clauses can be found only with ECM verbs (no
finite INFL = no case assigner for the external argument).  A major concern
would be to determine when English uses a null copula and when overt "be",
but that same question awaits thorough investigation anyway.  Perhaps the
asymmetry between agreement in predicative and attributive uses can be a
result of the difference between agreement across a copula (which may be
null) and agreement within NP, which because of their differing structures
(and the presence vs absence of a (possibly null) copula) may not need to
be expected to be the same.

Don Burquest
UT Arlington