Copular Sentences and the Hierarchical Lexicon

Copular Sentences and the Hierarchical Lexicon

  This paper examines syntactic and semantic properties of various types of ‘be’ sentences, and investigates how partially overlapping as well as distinct characteristics among those sentences can be accounted for in a non-derivational, lexical approach. This study argues that a major classification of ‘be’ sentences should be based on the two types of semantic interpretations that copular sentences have (i.e., predication and equation), so that such distinction can be represented in terms of a semantic dimension added to the lexeme hierarchy, reducing redundancy in describing individual lexical entries. A theoretical analysis is focused on the semantic representation of equative sentences such as it-clefts, to which previous analyses have not been much attentive.