Verbal and verbless copular clauses in Moro

Abstract

Abstract Moro has a rich array of copular clause constructions which show clear contrasts in their syntactic makeup. One class of copular clauses contain verbal heads, others are headed by non-verbal predicates that bear some inflectional morphology which is shared with verbs, while a final group of copular clauses lack any words which could be identified as verbs. I show that verbal and verb-like copular clauses always contain a predicative core. On the other hand, verbless copular clauses lack predicative semantics, serving the functions of identification or equation. I provide a simple syntactic analysis which accounts for the morphosyntactic distribution of the different types of clauses.