Equative and Predicational Copulas in Thai

Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt:

In this paper we report on an experimental study of the copula system in Thai. We argue that the Thai copula system is crucial to the debate over whether specifica-tional sentences should be given an inverse predicational analysis or an equative analysis. We conclude that Thai data supports the equative approach. The paper is organized as follows. We first introduce the inverse and equative analyses, and provide a little background on Thai. We then discuss our sentence acceptability task survey, and introduce the idea that the test items in the survey may have been subject to type-shifting. After that, we describe some interviews we did with Thai speakers aimed at fixing the semantic types of the test items. Finally, we discuss the results of the interviews and conclude.