Typology Versus Mythology: The Case of the Zero-Copula

Abstract

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.

Typological diversity in New Englishes

“…Properties that may appear to be 'typical of L2 varieties' may in fact be parallel cases of transfer of typologically common features in the substrates, or may be differently conditioned in each variety. This is not to deny the potential for genuinely substrate-independent universals governing the cross-linguistic behaviour of tense-aspect systems (Bybee, Perkins and Pagliuca 1994) or copula systems (Stassen 1994), but rather to distinguish among degrees of similarity in new Englishes and types of explanations offered.…”

Question Formation of Bahasa Indonesia as a Second Language

“…The LFG account of ESL question stage 4 and 5 is incompatible with the architecture of Indonesian question syntax. In other words, the absence of inversion in wh-+ copula and 'yes/no' questions (stage 4 in ESL stages of question) and inversion in wh-questions (stage 5) is because Indonesian is a zero-copula language (Stassen, 1994). It does not have any precise copula unlike English having 'be' (is, am, are, was, were).…”

“…So far, PT has been tested out against various languages, to name a few, French and German, Arabic, Japanese, and Chinese. Nevertheless, among those languages, Indonesian might be the only language with 'dual behaviour' (Travis, 2008) and 'zero copula' (Stassen, 1994). Dual behavior means that the linguistic behaviour of Indonesian situates in between Western Malayo-Polynesian and English.…”

“…In addition, Indonesian categorically resides in the SVO language, like English does. Zero copula means that the language does not have any precise copula, unlike English whose copula is 'be' (Stassen, 1994). Such unique typological characteristic lends itself a distinctive testing ground to PT, particularly for developmental stages in question formation.…”

Proceedings of the Fifth International Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Uralic Languages

“…Kiss (2002):72). This morphophonological constraint is related to the Third Person Parameter of Stassen (1994) which means that the (verbal) copula can only be omitted in the third person in present tense. See examples in (2).…”