The Copula Cycle Like negative markers, copula verbs can be seen to undergo regular, unidirectional change or grammaticalization and renewal. I refer to this regular changes as a cycle, following e.g. Hodge (1971) and Katz (1966). The sources of copulas include demonstratives, location verbs and verbs of change, and adpositions/adverbs. In this paper, I examine the demonstrative and verbal sources showing rapid change. The examples are taken from Chinese, Egyptian, Amerindian, various creoles, and different stages in the history of English (for the latter building on Biese 1952). A demonstrative –te is used as copula in (1) of Zoque, a Mixe-Zoque language of southern Mexico and a locational verb zitten `to sit’ is in (2) of Dutch, a Germanic language of Europe. (1)
(2)
Te’ tuwi kanaŋbüde te’ tuwi 0-kanaŋ=pü=te DET dog 3B-old=REL=PRED ‘The dog is old’ (Faarlund 2012: 141-2) Jan zit in Frankrijk Jan be in France ‘Jan is in France.’ (Hengeveld 1992: 238)
Zoque
Dutch
These changes from demonstratives and lexical verbs to copulas are relevant to current theoretical frameworks, in particular to the Minimalist Program (Chomsky 1995 and later). In this framework, there is an emphasis on features but which are universal is still debated. By looking at the features that change, in this case locational features, I contribute to that debate (see also van Gelderen 2011). I argue that the demonstrative and verbs have semantic and interpretable features that are reanalyzed as grammatical features. Depending on the semantic features of the original source (person, number, location, duration), the copula will be used for one of the many classes of copulas, third person pronouns for equational copulas.
References Biese, Y. 1952. Notes on the use of the ingressive auxiliary in the Works of William Shakespeare. Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 53: 9-18. Chomsky, Noam 1995. The Minimalist Program. MIT Press. Faarlund, Jan Terje 2012. A Grammar of Chiapas Zoque. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gelderen, Elly van 2011. The Linguistic Cycle. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hengeveld, Kees 1992. Non-verbal Predication. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Hodge, Carleton 1970. The Linguistic Cycle. Linguistic Sciences: 13: 1-7. Katz, Aya 1996. Cyclical Grammaticalization and the Cognitive Link between Pronoun and Copula. Rice Dissertation.