Those adjectives and null copulas

[Dick Hudson]

Don Burquest asks:

> 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.  

dh: It's true that null copulas sound a nice idea, but they may leave you
with a whole bunch of new problems. For example:

- In Arabic, the (predicative) complement of an overt copula is accusative,
but zero copulas are also ok, as in Bengali; but then the predicative is
nominative, presumably agreeing with the subject. 

- They won't help with the original problem of attributive adjectives and
using subjects to generalise agreement rules in languages like French; so
zero copulas would give you the extra problem of deciding whether or not to
recognise one in an attributive construction.

By the way, I agree that it's worth considering a subject-based analysis of
attributive adjectives like "good book", but it's important to recognise the
theoretical problem this raises for constituency-based theories like LFG. If
the subject of "good" is "book", this presumably isn't an NP so subjects can
be either NPs or N's; so why not let an ordinary subject (e.g. in "The book
is good") be an N as well? This answer is fine for dependency-based theories
like Word Grammar, but tricky for LFG? 


>

===============================================================================
Richard (=Dick) Hudson
Department of Phonetics and Linguistics,
University College London,
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