86 Carol Ge.ne.ttl and Kristine Hildebrandt
two core arguments (CS, CC) preceding a copula, to one with only one core argu-
ment (S), as represented in (30):
(30) [2phi=ko]sipirjkya]INTRANSITIVEPREDI
top=DEF blue
"The top of (it was) blue.'
The problem with this approach is that the adjective does not take on any charac-
teristics of predicates. Not only does the simple adjective lack verbal morphology,
it also cannot be followed by evidential.
(31) *iu ipir/kya imi
3sg blue EVID.PERF
'It was blue (I think).'
Alternatively, one can analyse the structure simply as lacking a predicate, and con-
sisting of a copula subject and a copula complement:
(32) [2phi=ko]cs [ipir/kya]cc
top=DEF blue
This structure does not result in any structural or functional ambiguity. Consid-
er the fact that the only position for a simple adjective outside of a noun phrase
is the copula complement slot. Thus when a speaker produces a noun phrase fol-
lowed by a simple adjective, he or she is invoking the copular structure, signalling
to the hearer to assign the simple adjective to the copula complement. Once this
is done, the copula, being empty semantically, provides no additional information
that is needed to understand either the structure or the meaning of the clause. If
the speaker needs to convey additional information in the predicate, such as evi-
dentiality, negation, modality, or perfectivity, then the copula must be present as
the 'magnet' for these categories. This is why the verb itA 'become', which also par-
ticipates in structures with copula complements, cannot be unexpressed; it con-
veys the additional aspectual information of entrance into a state.
If we accept that adjectives may maintain their copula complement status even
in the absence of the copula, then the same argument may be made for nouns.
That is, rather than assuming that the sentence irjA. lamtsi T am a doctor/healer'
consists of two NPs in apposition, we can maintain the symmetry between the
ascriptive and the predicative adjective structures if we analyse the NPs as filling
two separate syntactic slots, the first being the copula subject, and the second the
copula complement. This analysis also has an ancillary benefit of allowing us to
then restrict the notion of apposition so that it holds only between two adjacent,
coreferential NPs that have the same syntactic status in a clause (both are either A,
S, O, CS, or CC).
3.3.3. Causation strategiesManange has three causation strategies: morphological, bi-clausal, and lexical.