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The grammaticalisation of a copula in vernacular Arabic

Paper · 2019 · Maris Camilleri and Louisa Sadler

Summary

Standard descriptions say that present-tense copula clauses in Arabic have only two options. A null copula marks predication, and a pronominal copula marks identity or equative clauses. Camilleri and Sadler argue that this view misses real dialect data. They compare data across varieties, including judgments from native speaker informants. In several vernaculars, including Maltese and Urban Hijazi, a third, overt copula is emerging from gāʕid, the active participle of the posture verb 'sit'. This form behaves like a stage-level or locative copula. It marks temporary locations and contingent states, while the null copula covers defining, individual-level properties. From the cross-dialect variation, the authors reconstruct a grammaticalisation path that matches paths proposed for posture-verb copulas in unrelated languages. They also identify a separate path in which the same form became a bleached existential predicate. Finally, they show that Sason (Anatolian) and Algerian Arabic are building comparable splits from different sources. They present this as the first explicit claim that a posture verb has grammaticalised into a copula in Semitic.

Key points

  • The paper describes a three-way present-tense split in some dialects: null copula (characterising properties), pronominal copula (equative/identity), and a new gāʕid-type copula (contingent states and locations).
  • Varieties differ in how far the change has gone:
    • Maltese qiegħed/qed has largely lost its postural meaning and works as a locative copula across the board.
    • Urban Hijazi keeps the lexical 'sit' sense and uses gāʕid only for particular, time-anchored locations.
  • Two parallel systems come from other sources: special 3rd-person stage-level copula forms in Sason, and rā+inflection in Algerian, which derives from 'see'.
  • In all three systems, the new copula form also serves as a progressive (and sometimes habitual) auxiliary with imperfective verbs. The authors leave the link between the two functions for future work.
  • The framework draws on Higgins' three-way taxonomy of copular clauses (predicational, equative, specificational), defined by whether the subject and the complement are referential. It is compared with the Irish is/bí split and with Kuuk Thaayore posture-verb copulas.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Copular clauses can be classified by a small table that asks whether the subject and the complement are each referential, which cleanly separates predicational, equative and specificational readings.
  • I2. Which copula a language picks can signal whether a property is temporary and contingent or permanent and defining, so the stage-level vs individual-level contrast is encoded overtly in many languages.
  • I3. One surface form can sit at different points on a path from lexical verb to copula to aspectual auxiliary, depending on variety and context, rather than being simply lexical or grammatical.
  • I4. The authors reconstruct a historical sequence by arranging related varieties according to how far each has gone, so synchronic variation stands in for missing diachronic records.
  • I5. The fact that the copula and the progressive auxiliary share a form across varieties suggests the two functions are related rather than accidental homonyms.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (frames): Use this two-feature test on "be" clauses to decide whether to emit a property-ascription frame or an identity link between two entities, which also helps coreference.
  • I2 (world): Mark each stored property as contingent or characteristic, so that "is in the garden" can change along the event timeline while "is a teacher" persists unless explicitly revised.
  • I3 (tree): When English verbs show partial grammaticalisation (e.g. "keep", "go" + infinitive), let the parser and UD dialect conversion choose between head, aux and cop by context instead of by a fixed lexicon entry.
  • I4 (learn): Order evaluation items by how far a construction has drifted from its literal sense, building graded test sets that show where the parser or frame builder starts to fail.
  • I5 (tree): Treat English copular "be" and progressive "be" with shared features in tagging and parsing, so that errors in one analysis can be checked against the other.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🎓University of EssexColchester · United Kingdom25 works · 3,285 citations

📚 Shelves 2The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 9,296 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 9,206 works

🧭 Topics 2Research subjects and languages the work is about.Semitic languages · 1,484 worksHistorical linguistics & language change · 159 works

Cite

Cite as Maris Camilleri and Louisa Sadler. 2019. The grammaticalisation of a copula in vernacular Arabic. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.5334/gjgl.915

@article{camilleri2019grammaticalisation,
  title = {{The grammaticalisation of a copula in vernacular Arabic}},
  author = {Maris Camilleri and Louisa Sadler},
  journal = {Glossa: a journal of general linguistics},
  year = {2019},
  doi = {10.5334/gjgl.915},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.915}
}

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  52. How to cite this article: Camilleri, Maris and Louisa Sadler. 2019. The grammaticalisation of a copula in vernacular Arabic. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 4(1): 137. 1–33. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.915 ↗
  53. Submitted: 08 February 2019 find
  54. Accepted: 29 September 2019 find
  55. Published: 18 December 2019 find
  56. Copyright: © 2019 The Author(s). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics is a peer-reviewed open access journal published by Ubiquity Press. OPEN ACCESS ↗

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