2025/02/06 by Tan, Tamisha
#copula cycle #grammaticalisation #non-verbal predication #predicative agreement #pronominal copulas #syntactic reanalysis
paper · doi:10.18148/hs/2025.v9i2-10.215
While the well-attested Pronominal Copula Cycle has been explored from both typological and formal perspectives (Li & Thompson 1977, Katz 1996, Stassen 2003, van Gelderen 2011), this paper expands on this diachronic pathway by investigating the relationship between fully-agreeing pronominal copulas and person-sensitive predicative agreement morphology, illustrating each stage of the cycle with a range of genetically and geographically diverse languages. In doing so, it identifies the morphosyntactic parameters along which pronominal copulas differ cross-linguistically and provides a synchronic and diachronic account thereof. In particular, it is proposed that whether a language innovates a fully-agreeing, deficient, or invariant copula depends on its treatment of radically underspecified 3SG resumptive pronouns in surface-ambiguous left-dislocation constructions. The types of variation attested in this expanded cycle are furthermore shown to evoke the appearance of gradience in grammatical change both within a given paradigm and across categories, with theoretical implications for the representation of phi-features, the relationship between reduction and linearisation, and the nature of non-canonical or fossilised case-marking.