This  qualitative  study  investigates  the  uses  of  be  in  Contemporary  English.  Based  on  this  study, one  easy  claim  and  one  more  difficult  claim  are  proposed.  The  easy  claim  is  that  the  traditional distinction between be as a lexical verb and be as an auxiliary is faulty. In particular, 'copular-be', traditionally considered to be a lexical verb, is in fact a prototypi...

In this paper, we argue that specificational copular clauses are derived equations which are distinct from genuine equatives. While the latter has an equative copula, the former achieves a semantics of equation through type-shift. The account presented here not only allows us to maintain a predicate inversion analysis for specificational copular clauses but also explain when a predicate can be ...

We propose an intermediary-level semantic representation, providing a higher level of abstraction than syntactic parse trees, while not committing to decisions in cases such as quantification, grounding or verbspecific roles assignments. The proposal is centered around the proposition structure of the text, and includes also implicit propositions which can be inferred from the syntax but are no...

We examine the distribution and interpretation of post-copular noun phrases in French when they appear with and without an indefinite article (Marie est (une) physicienne). We propose that the alternation is due to the fact that the indefinite article marks saturation of an NP-internal argument slot, and show that because of this, post-copular indefinite NPs are usually but not always existenti...

This paper presents an analysis of identificational sentences like That is a woman and That is Rosa as predicational sentences. We argue that the pre-copular demonstrative denotes an individual concept and that the post-copular phrase denotes a sort, in the sense of Gupta (1980): a function from worlds into sets of individual concepts. These sentences provide evidence for a model in which trans...

In this paper, we present some preliminary observations on the syntactic analysis of copular constructions in LFG. We suggest several conclusions and directions for future research. First, the open analysis is appropriate for some copular constructions but not for others, even within the same language. Second, the same construction can be open in some languages and closed in others. Third, we c...

We examine the periphrastic passive construction in Latin, in which a part of the verb paradigm is expressed by an auxiliary/copular verb ‘to be’ with the perfective passive participle, with the syntax of a predicative adjective construction. Building in part on the treatment sketched by Börjars, Vincent and Chapman (1997) and other recent work in Lexical Functional Grammar (Frank and Zaenen, 1...

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