Existential Utterances and Their Negations in Dravidian

Although historical texts document a clear division between assertions of identity & those of existence in earlier stages of Dravidian languages, their modern descendants have nearly obliterated this distinction. Assertive & negative copulas of 15 Dravidian languages, representing all branches of the family, are listed & shown to derive from five verbal roots with meanings suggesting permanency or becoming. Equative utterances are divided into two types: those of general truth or timeless quality, where the copula is optional & verbless sentences are frequent, & those expressing acquired or temporally contingent qualities, which require a copula that, in many of the languages, specifies temporariness. Existential & situative expressions tend to use identical copulas & differ only in word order, which follows a theme-rheme pattern. The use of an equative copula is judged to be comparatively recent, resulting from the spread of existential copulas at the expense of verbless sentences. J. Hitchcock