The Grammar of Copulas Across Languages

María J. Arche is Associate Professor of Linguistics & Spanish at the University of Greenwich. Her research focuses on the syntax and semantics of tense and aspect and their acquisition. She is the author of Individuals in Time: Tense, Aspect and the Individual/Stage Distinction (Benjamins, 2006) and co-editor of The Grammar Dimension in Instructed Second Language Learning (Bloomsbury, 2013), and has edited special issues of Natural Language and Linguistic Theory and Lingua on aspect and argument structure.


Antonio Fábregas is Full Professor of Hispanic Linguistics at the University of Tromsø - The Arctic University of Norway. His research concentrates on the syntax and semantics of word-internal structures, with particular attention to grammatical categories, aspect and tense, and the properties of affixes. He is the co-author of Morphology: From Data to Theories (Edinburgh University Press, 2012) and co-editor of Contemporary Linguistic Parameters (Bloomsbury, 2015).


Rafael Marín is Researcher in Linguistics at the STL laboratory, CNRS / Université de Lille 3. His work focuses on lexical aspect and related phenomena. He has mainly worked on non-verbal predication (adjectives and participles, copular constructions), psychological predicates, and morphology-semantics interface. Since 2016, he has been the Director of the Catalan Foundation for Research and Innovation.

This volume presents a crosslinguistic survey of the current theoretical debates around copular constructions from a generative perspective. Following an introduction to the main questions surrounding the analysis and categorization of copulas, the chapters address a range of key topics including the existence of more than one copular form in certain languages, the factors determining the presence or absence of a copula, and the morphology of copular forms. The team of expert contributors present new theoretical proposals regarding the formal mechanisms behind the behaviour and patterns observed in copulas in a wide range of typologically diverse languages, including Czech, French, Korean, and languages from the Dene and Bantu families. Their findings have implications beyond the study of copulas and shed more light on issues such as agreement relations, the nature of grammatical categories, and nominal predicates in syntax and semantics.

This volume presents a crosslinguistic survey of the current theoretical debates around copular constructions from a generative perspective. The chapters combine the study of empirical data with theoretical analyses and shed light on key issues such as agreement, the nature of grammatical categories, and nominal predicates in syntax and semantics.