Copularization and Lexical Semantics
Regina Pustet · Oxford University Press eBooks · 2003
This chapter looks for additional semantic principles underlying the distributional behavior of copulas. As a point of departure, more detailed empirical evidence is presented in support of the hypothesis that the syntactic feature of presence vs. absence of copulas indeed correlates with the semantic parameter of time-stability, which figures so prominently in current works on lexical categorization. However, the semantic parameters of dynamicity, transitivity, and dependency are equally important in motivating the influence of lexical semantics on copula distribution. This chapter discusses the results of a pilot study on copularization and time-stability, as well as copularization and lexical semantics, lexical minimal pairs, semantic features and statistics, predictive power of semantic features, and competing semantic models of copularization.