Sixth-year graduate student Omri Doron gave a talk at Tel Aviv University’s Interdisciplinary Colloquium on January 23rd, 2025, with the title “Revisiting pronominal copulas”. Here is the abstract:
Hebrew nonverbal sentences sometimes contain what looks like a pronoun between the subject and the predicate (“Pron”), which agrees with the subject (1). It is a part of a broader corsslinguistic pattern of particles that resemble a pronoun on the surface, but have the distribution of a copula.
(1) dana (hi) gvoa
Dana (Pron.3FSG) tall
“Dana is tall”Doron (1983) analyzes Pron as the realization of agreement features in I⁰, spelled out as a pronoun in the lack of a verb. I point out that this analysis is unable to account for Pron’s complicated distribution and interpretative effects, and argue for an alternative analysis of Pron as a resumptive pronoun. I then show that this analysis can shed light on the interaction of Pron with genericity (Greenberg, 2002).