Have and BE verbs

[Dan Parvaz]

> Why would the existentials be so important and the copula so
> unimportant in sign
> languages I wonder...?

Isn't this true beyond the SL domain? Equational sentences in Russian
aren't generally formed with the copula, but existentials are still
formed with some variation on "uvas yest'." This is far from universal;
Mandarin Chinese doesn't need it:

qiang2 shang4 gua4 zhe  yi1  fu hua4
wall     on         hang DUR one CL painting
"There is a painting hanging on the wall." (Li and Thompson's chapter in
Comrie 1987)

But I wonder if there is a language which doesn't have an existential
construction, but requires a "non-zero" copula.  Not much of an
explanation, I know. Anyway, you're the typologist.

The information I'm presenting below is still half-baked analysis based
on data collected in Jordan.

In LIU (Jordanian SL), there is an existential (and two suppletive
negatives -- I haven't yet cinched down the distribution):

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And there is also a sign, which I'm not entirely sure how to gloss:

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This gets used for some possession and personal characteristics (kind of
like POSS++ in ASL).

Regular indicative pronouns are also used for possession.

[NAME IX-you]t [WHAT]wh
"what's your name?"

Need... more... data... (and analysis -- stay tuned!)

Cheers,

Dan.