Hawaiian He, 'o, and I: Copular Verbs, Prepositions, or Determiners?

Abstract

Carter (1996) has claimed that the Hawaiian words he, 'o, and i are copular verbs. This paper argues against Carter's claim and presents evidence in favor of the traditional analyses of he as an indefinite determiner and i as a preposition. It also analyzes the 'o that marks predicate nominals as a copular preposition (rather than a copular verb), and it analyzes the i that Carter claims is a copular verb as a preposition that marks resulting entities. Arguments that he, 'o, and i are not copular verbs involve (among other things) tense/aspect markers, syllable length, nominalizations, postposed phrasal elements, as well as the distribution of particular lexical items. Observations conceming situation emphatio sentences, relative clauses, and the anaphoric pronoun ai are used to support the traditional analysis of i as a preposition. Carter's claims concerning he are based on facts conceming differences in syntactic positions of he and the (other) determiners. This paper shows that the same facts are accommodated by a rule that disallows all prepositions (except me 'like') before he. This rule is not ad hoc; it accounts for the lack of prepositions before he when he occurs with a predicate noun, a direct object, and a goal of motion, and it accounts for the absence of the preposition 'o 'of' in the expression ma ke 'ano he 'in the manner (of) a'. Carter's analysis cannot account for the fact that he precedes not only predicate nominals but also intransitive subjects, direct objects, and goals of motion. The proposed analysis is supported by comparative evidence drawn from the related Polynesian languages Maori and Samoan and from Hawaii Creole English.