GASPRO International Journal of Eminent Scholars

ABSTRACT

The paper described the morphology and semantics of copula verbs in Kana. The analysis was done utilizing a formal linguistic framework. The paper reported that three morphological variants of the copula verbs occur in the language: the overt copula, the null copula and the pseudo copula. The paper found that there are two forms of the overt copula, lu and lè with complementary syntactic distribution. Lu occurs in predicative constructions while lè occurs in existential and locative constructions. The paper showed that the null copula occurs in discourse contexts in which a sentence lacks an overt subject in surface syntax; while the pseudo copula occurs as a lexical variant of the Kana copula verb. The paper also found that Kana copula verbs express predicative, locative, existential and equative meanings in discourse structure. The paper claimed that the locative copula in Kana cannot occur in the progressive aspect which is a marked contrast to the situation in most Niger-Congo languages as a number of these languages permits progressivity in locative structures.

KEYWORDS: Kana, Copula, Structure, Morphology, Semantics.