Is there a VP complement?

Unlike the NP, AP, PP and AdvP complements, the verb and its complement, either with

kaana or laysa, cannot precede the subject. Compare (42a) and (43) to (52) and (53) below:

(52) *kaana kataba t-taqriir-a zayd-u-n

be.PFV.3SG.M write.PFV.3SG.M the-report.SG-ACC Zaid-NOM-NN

(53) a. *kaana yaktubu t-taqriir-a zayd-u-n

be.PFV.3SG.M write.IPFV.INDC.3SG.M the-report.SG-ACC Zaid-NOM-NN

b. *laysa yaktubu t-taqriir-a zayd-u-n

be.NEG.3SG.M write.IPFV.INDC.3SG.M the-report.SG-ACC Zaid-NOM-NN

It is also ungrammatical for the verb and its complement to precede the copula as in (54) and (555).

(54) * kataba t-taqriir-a kaana zayd-u-n

write.PFV.3SG.M the-report.SG-ACC be.PFV.3SG.M Zaid-NOM-NN

(75) a. *yaktubu t-taqriir-a kaana zayd-u-n

b. *yaktubu t-taqriir-a laysa zayd-u-n

write.IPFV.INDC.3SG.M the-report.SG-ACC be.NEG.3SG.M Zaid-NOM-NN

This test suggests that the verb and its complement do not form a constituent, i.e. a VP complement. In other words, the movement constituency test shows that the verb and its complement can neither precede the subject nor the copula. This reveals that instead of having a structure like (56) with a VP complement, we have a structure like (57) with the copula as the head of a flat structure.

(56) S

V NP VP

V NP

kaana zayd-u-n yaktubu t-taqriir-a

(57) S

V NP V NP

In (57), the subject, the verb and its complement are all sisters of the copula in which the copula is the head of the flat structure (Abeillѐ and Godard, 2002).

On the other hand, a coordination test shows us that the verb and its complement can be coordinated with, for example, a copula’s AP complement as in (58):

(58) kaana baʕD-u T-Tullaab-i ɁaðkiyaaɁ-a wa yaʕmaluuna bi-jiddin

be.PFV some-NOM the-student.PL-GEN clever.PL-ACC and work.IPFV by-hard

‘Some students were intelligent and working hard’

The coordination test, as in (58), contrasts with the movement test as the coordination test reveals that the verb and its complement here form a VP complement. However, the

coordination test cannot be relied on as there are well-known cases of non-constituent coordination (Sag et al., 1985). In such cases, two conjuncts which are not governed by the same head are coordinated, as in (59) below:

(59) ɁaʕTaytu zayd-an kitaab-an wa xaalid-an qalam-an

give.PFV.1SG Zaid-ACC book.SG-ACC and Khalid-ACC pen.SG-ACC

‘I gave Zaid a book and Khalid a pen’

In (59), xaalid-an qalam-an, ‘Khalid a pen’ are not complements of the overt verb

and kitaab-an ‘a book’)23. Therefore, it appears that the coordination test here is not accurate to provide us with the right analysis. Consequently, it seems that the complements of the copula can be NP, AP, PP, AdvP or verbal. However, the assumption that the copula takes a verbal complement is problematic.

A problem arises from analysing the auxiliary, e.g. in (42a) and (43a) above, as a copula that takes a verbal complement. The problem is that the tense/aspect interpretation such sentences have does not come from the copula itself nor from the lexical verb alone. In fact, it is a compound tense that both the copula/auxiliary and the lexical verb express. That is, in compound tenses there is a combination between a (finite) auxiliary verb (i.e. the copula in the above section) and an imperfective indicative or perfective (finite) verb forms (Alsharif and Sadler, 2009). This combination, essentially, gives, for example, sentence (43a) the past progressive interpretation.

If we analyse the auxiliary in (42a) and (43a) as a copula that takes imperfective indicative or perfective verb forms as its complement, it is not clear how tense/aspect can be interpreted. That is, tense in such a case is periphrastic. Note that if the auxiliary perfective form is combined with an imperfective indicative lexical verb form, then it is not necessary to have the same tense/aspect interpretation. For example, while (43a) is given past progressive interpretation, sentence (60) below is given past future interpretation:

(60) kaana zayd-u-n sa-yaktubu t-taqriir-a

be.PFV3SG.M Zaid-NOM-NN FUT-write.IPFV.INDC.3SG.M the-report.SG-ACC

‘Zaid was going to write the report’

23

The difference between (43a) and (60) is that the imperfective indicative verb form in (60) is inflected for future tense by the prefex sa-. It is not clear how this can e ensured if we adopt the assumption that the tense auxiliary is a copula that takes perfective/imperfective verb forms as its complement. This, obviously, puts in question the possibility for the copula to have a verbal complement. For this reason, I will not further discuss the analysis of the copula in these constructions in this thesis, and will leave it for future research.

So far, we saw that the copula can take an XP complement that is not headed by a vern. Moreover, it is argued in Aoun et al. (2010) that the complement of the copula can also be a small clause. Argubly, this is the case in existential sentences. This possibility will be examined in the next subsection.