development of a copula from the verb 'to come'

[Anna Giacalone]

Dear Sebastian,
if you want to include in your query the grammaticalization of "come " 
as an auxiliary, then you should look for Italian, where venire "come" 
is used for passive diathesis:
  la casa     venne distrutta
  the house came destroyed = was destroyed
In trhis context it would also be possible to use andare "go":
la casa andò distrutta.
I refer you to :
A. Giacalone Ramat , /On some grammaticalization patterns for 
auxiliaries/, in J.C.Smith & Delia Bentley (eds), /Historical 
Linguistics 1995/. /Vol.I: General issues and non-Germanic languages/. 
Amsterdam, Benjamins, 2000, 125-154
best wishes
Anna

Il 21/12/2009 17:33, Sebastian Nordhoff ha scritto:
> Dear colleagues,
> I am looking for languages with a copula where this copula derives 
> from the lexical verb meaning 'to come'. One such language is Sri 
> Lanka Malay where the copula /asàdhaathang/ is clearly related to the 
> verb /dhaathang/ 'to come' (The copula is homonymous with the 
> 'conjunctive participle', to be precise).
> (1)  Se=ppe  naama asàdhaathang  Cintha  Sinthani.     1s=poss name  
> copula        Chintha Sinthani
>    `My name is Chintha Sinthani.'
> This seems to be a rather unusual diachronic source; it is more common 
> for the copula to develop from an existential or a pronoun. I would 
> appreciate if list members could point out languages with similar 
> developments. I would also be happy to hear about less-than-perfect 
> matches, e.g. grammaticalization of 'come' to an auxiliary, or 
> grammaticalization of another motion verb to a copula. I have 
> consulted The World Lexicon of Grammaticalization (Heine & Kuteva 
> 2002), and the closest match I could find was come-->resultative as 
> found in some Creole languages (Seychellois, Guyanese CF, Fa d'Ambu).
>
> Thanks in advance
> Sebastian
>

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