The meaning(s) of ‘copula’

There are terms in the history of science which, from the time that they were first adopted, have never been dropped. This is the case with such well-known terms as ‘atom’ or ‘energy’ or ‘gene’. In reality, however, we all know that this continuity is only superficial; in the course of time terms of this type inevitably change their original meaning. The result of this is that, even though in most cases we are prepared to acknowledge that some basic core intuition, contained in the term in question when it was originally coined, has indeed survived, we are accustomed to treating such terms with great care: in particular, before they can be used in any sort of scientific treatise, exhaustive definitions have to be given.

From this point of view, linguistics is no different from any other field of inquiry. Terms like ‘verb’ or ‘subject’ or ‘negation’ may well not mean the same thing now as they did at earlier stages in the study of language. There is therefore a risk of generating confusion, especially in studies that draw on more than one theoretical tradition.

In this brief appendix my aim is to investigate the term ‘copula’: I will attempt to show that, in its common use, it conceals at least three distinct traditions which have been taken over by modern linguistics complete with their various inconsistencies and obscurities.

A brief survey of three major approaches

Three major approaches will be briefly illustrated here. In the first section, Aristotle's theory will be presented insofar as it can be reconstructed in its essential lines from the De Interpretatione.

This chapter will be devoted to the interaction of various aspects of morphosyntax. First I will continue with some implications of the Elsewhere Pattern Prediction for linker interaction. The default is supposed to apply whenever nothing else can. The strongest evidence for the default status of any case is when its opportunities for application form as unnatural a class as possible. The choice is between, on the one hand, positing a very unlikely set of homophonous cases (or other linker type) which just happen to fill in all the gaps of the other linkers and, on the other, simply positing a default linker. The second type of interaction examined in this chapter will be between the valence-changing operations known as passive and antipassive and the linkers. The question is whether the system as it stands will predict the correct case even under circumstances of changed valence. Section 4.2 will show that a suppression view of the passive and the present theory of case interact to give exactly the right derived case frames. I will then extend the discussion, which has so far concentrated mostly on case (and to a limited degree on agreement), to linking by word-order position. I will present an analysis of a language that relies primarily on word-order position, English. Finally, it will be shown that the present system is equipped to handle the interaction of case and configuration in oblique and non-oblique contexts.

Other elsewhere patterns

The Elsewhere Pattern Prediction has further implications which I would like to turn to now. The nature of a default is that it applies in the complement of the places where anything else applies.

In order to put the preceding proposals into perspective, some concluding remarks on the nature of linking theory are in order. What I have proposed is a theory both of how certain surface properties are related to each other and of how these relate to the wide array of properties associated with grammatical functions, the results of linking on our system. The theory derives grammatical functions largely on a basis that is closely related to surface form. The theory must be tested language by language, and cumulatively, to see whether it handles surface and grammatical function facts well and, most importantly, simultaneously.

First, it is important to keep in mind what the consequences of distinguishing morphological and syntactic case are. Most theories make this distinction one way or another. Something in the theory will be distinct both from morphological case and argument structure. As we have argued, distinguishing grammatical functions from morphological case is one such tool but one which does not put much of a constraint on the relation of morphology to argument structure.

Direct linking opposes linkers to morphological case and to argument structure. Different morphological cases may not be instantiations of the same linker, but we do allow the same case to reflect different linkers, different syntactic cases. Once we have allowed this, though, one might object that the analysis of a given language is by no means unique. How can we tell if two instances of dative reflect different linkers – different syntactic datives, two rules – or not?

As a preliminary matter, it should be remembered that the same problem arises on conventional grammatical function- or structural position-based approaches.