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Despite some realprogress in t he study ofpart-of-speech Systems during t he last two decades their ränge of Variation in the world's languages has not been properly assessed. After a summary of the state of the art a template for part-of-speech typology isproposed that outlines parameters of Variation and possible constraints on the logically available options, with the aim of prompting further work on the topic.

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It is widely believed that copulas perform a mere grammatical function, as carriers of grammatical categories such as Tense, Mood and Aspect in sentences with non-verbal predicates. Accordingly, zero copulas are predicted to occur only in contexts where these grammatical categories are unmarked. This article argues that this view of copulas, and especially of zero copula encoding, is untenable as a principle of Universal Grammar. More generally, the article demonstrates how typological generalizations can be used as an evaluation measure for putative abstract principles of linguistic theory.

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