User:Lazmike/sandbox

Structure: Brief Intro and Definition + explaining copular and non-copular equatives Copular English French German Non-Copular Russian Polish Arabic

Equatives: Construction Equative sentences consist of two DP’s and a copular verb, which appears either as an empty auxiliary or as a true verb that shows identity between DP’s (Adger & Ramchand). English - equative sentences resemble predicative sentences in that they have two noun phrases and a copular verb ‘to be’. The familiarity is merely superficial. Equative predication basically says that the first and second noun phrase share the same referent. It is difficult to distinguish between a predicative and equative sentence in English as both use a similar construction and both require the copular verb ‘to be’. Russian equative sentences differ from predicational ones syntactically. They require a constant form of the demonstrative pronoun ‘eto’ to indicate that the two XP’s have the same referent. This is because Russian has a zero present form copula (byt’ has no present tense form). The demonstrative pronoun, however, is excluded from predicational sentences. In addition, although Russian has case endings on the ends of nouns, both XP’s occur in the nominative case in an equative sentence but not in a predicational one. The demonstrative pronoun likewise never gets inflected in equative sentences. The use of pronouns in equative pronouns seems to be rather common in world languages. Standard Arabic and Modern Hebrew, unlike Russian, employ a personal pronoun instead of a demonstrative one. (Geist)
 * ident-type-shift

Lazmike (talk) 16:19, 28 October 2014 (UTC)