Absence of Copula and the Notion of Simplicity: A Study of Normal Speech, Baby Talk, Foreigner Talk and Pidgins

Abstract

Abstract The purpose of this paper is to examine one feature of human language in a general typological framework in order to obtain some insights into the notion of grammatical simplicity. The feature in question is the presence in some languages, or special varieties or registers of a single language, of an overt connecting link, or COPULA, between nominal subjects and complements in equational clauses of the type X is YI as compared with the absence of such a link in other languages or other varieties of the same language. Thus, English My brother is a student and Japanese Aniwa gakkusee desu differ from Russian Moj brat student(om) or Arabic ‘Axf tilmfoun by having a copula (is, desu) which has no overt equivalent in the latter two languages. Similarly, English Your mother is outside or has gone out may correspond to baby talk Mommy bye-bye with no copula, or French La machine est grande ‘The machine is big’ corresponds to Haitian Creole Machinna gro.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 237 citations exist upstream.