Resumen de Copular and existential constructions

Delia Bentley, Francesco Maria Ciconte

• The main goal of this chapter is critically to address from a comparative perspective some of the most important issues in Romance copular and existential constructions, covering such areas as the range of Romance copulas and their semantico-syntactic distribution; canonical vs inverse copular sentences; relationship between locative and existential copular predications; variation in existential copulas and their constraints on the nature of the pivot; subject markedness; sources, nature, and distribution of locative adverbials; definiteness effects; variation in verb agreement with locative or pivot. Specific topics dealt with include: copular constructions (attributive, locative, and possessive), inverse copular constructions, and existential constructions.