What's in a copula?

Abstract

This paper develops a syntactic account for Kirundi's two "copulas", the inflecting -ri and the invariant ni. I propose that these two morphemes correspond to two distinct syntactic positions, v and C respectively. This stands in contrast to a previous, semantic account for the analogous system in Kinyarwanda. I present morphological and distributional data which support the view that -ri lexicalizes v for two reasons: (i) to permit the projection of independently necessary verbal inflectional heads and to morphologically host the affixes that lexicalize them and (ii) to bind the eventuality variable introduced by location-denoting PP predicates. The two conditions are unified under the analysis that -ri, but not ni, indicates the presence of v. I argue that this account is able to capture a wider range of the distribution and properties of the two "copulas" than prior accounts.