Selected Papers from the Fourteenth International ... - STIBA Malang

2 Peter Petré & Hubert Cuyckens
(E) Copula + np
( 3) Ha nis nan husewif ach is anchurcheancre. (c 225( 200). Ancrene Riwle-2:II.303)
“She is not a housewife, but [she] is a church-anchoress.”
(F) Perfect participle
( 4) Nu is þæt bearn cymen. (c970. Christ: 66)
“Now the child has come.”
(G) Passive participle
( 5) Iudas […] is cwylmed mid deoflum on þæm ecum witum.
(c970. HomS 7 [BlHom 5]: 63. 42)
“Judas […] is tortured by devils in eternal punishment.”
( 6) He byþ gehæled. (c 025. Lch [Herb]: 0. )
He will be cured.”
The main difference between these copulas is of an aspectual nature. For instance,
weorðan + ap in (4) signals that the transition from ‘not-afraid’ to ‘afraid’ constitutes
a sudden change (similar to PDE get), is + ap in ( ) expresses a timeless
truth, and, finally, beoþ + ap in ( 2) is used to express a general condition. Similar
aspectual distinctions can be read off from the other examples as well. Still, to a
large extent, these verbs are used as copulas in highly similar contexts. This distributional
overlap, we would like to argue, has led in (pre-)OE to the emergence
of a series of high-level constructions in which aspectual differences are no longer
represented, and only syntactic and semantic similarities between the different
copulas are preserved. Syntactically, these high-level schemas represent the shared
potential to co-occur with certain types of subject complement (i.e., pp, ap, np,
and pple). With each syntactic schema corresponds a semantic schema. In the
case of NP complements, the shared semantics is that of categorization of the subject
into a class of entities, in the case of aps that of assigning a property to the
subject, in the case of pps that of assigning a location or class to a subject, and in
the case of pples that of a resulting state to a subject. At a still higher level, these
constructions (C)–(G) can be considered part of an even bigger constructional
network, to which they are related through an even more schematic construction.
Syntactically, at least in OE, all the different types of subject complement share the
property (as in most Indo-European languages) of being in the nominative case,
and they are obligatory. 4 Semantically, the properties of non-agentivity and nonvolitionality
of the subject are shared. Furthermore, the subject complements coconstitute
(with the copulas) what is being predicated of the subject, whereby the
semantic content of the copula verb is subsidiary to that of the subject complement.
4. As prepositions are uninflected for case in OE, the case criterion is not relevant for PPs.