The case for broader copulas

Abstract

Abstract Discovering, comparing, and contrasting natural kinds is critical for scientific progress. It should be the goal of linguistic inquiry to seek out natural kinds within and between languages. Unfortunately, the most common definition of a copula is consistently inadequate for categorizing and comparing the data in cross-linguistic research on this topic. The categories of pseudo-copula and semi-copula have been offered to account for constructions which resemble the copular relationship between subject and complement, though with added meaning in that relationship. I will argue that copulas, defined more broadly, function in diverse ways cross-linguistically to instantiate the alterable feature-driven relationship between subject and complement. This article presents a gradient view of copulas based on a set of binary featural parameters with which a language may represent with one or more copulas. A formal description of this phenomena is also offered within in the framework of Distributed Morphology, building on Wilson (2020) .