What is it about?
In some languages of the Dene/Athapaskan family of North America, copulas (BE verbs) have turned into grammatical functional words. In these languages, some copulas have become tense markers while others have become markers of clausal focus. I propose that the kinds of predicates introduced by the copulas have determined their development into different kinds of grammatical markers.
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Why is it important?
Copulas frequently become grammaticalized in the languages of the world. It is also well known that in languages with multiple-copula systems, such as Spanish and Portuguese, different copulas become grammaticalized in different ways. This paper proposes a principled motivation for this process in the Dene languages of North America, raising the possibility that it may be responsible for similar differences in copula grammaticalization in other languages as well.
Perspectives
This article, for me, provides an example of how syntactic structure can have a profound influence on language change, and also of how that structure can determine sentence semantics. The process of writing it made me think about the connection between transformational syntax and historical linguistics, two subfields that still do not have a large overlap in literature.
Nicholas Welch
Memorial University of Newfoundland
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Differential grammaticalization of copulas in Tsúùt’ínà and Tłı̨chǫ Yatıì, Diachronica, July 2019, John Benjamins,
DOI: 10.1075/dia.15031.wel.
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