Non-verbal Predication in the World's Languages : a Typological Survey , 1

Eurasia, North America, South America

Bertinetto, Pier Marco (ed.)
Ciucci, Luca (ed.)
Creissels, Denis (ed.)

The notion of predication is usually associated with the lexical class of verbs. However, the predicate function may also be expressed by Noun / Adjective / Adverb / Quantifier Phrases:
a. John is a doctor. b. The man is old. c. The boys are in the garden. d. Sam's friends are many.
Natural languages do, with respect to non-verbal predication, what they are expected to do in any compartment of grammar: they sharply diverge in their behavior.
This book offers a wide typological overview of how languages deal with non-verbal predication (henceforth: NVP). After the pioneering works by Hengeveld (1992) and Stassen (1997), no other work has attempted to provide a comprehensive overview of this pervasive syntactic phenomenon. Hence, the need for this book.