page_title: Nominal sentence
section_title: Syntactic structure and analyses
hierarchical_section_title: Nominal sentence / Syntactic structure and analyses
caption_attribution_description: English: Cross language comparison of 'I am happy' with a copular verb (English) and without (Arabic). The tree structure diagram uses X Bar theory from the 1990s. Licensing under This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. Attribution: Attribution details You are free: to share – to copy, distribute and transmit the work to remix – to adapt the work Under the following conditions: attribution – You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use. share alike – If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same or compatible license as the original.
context_page_description: Nominal sentence is a linguistic term that refers to a nonverbal sentence. As a nominal sentence does not have a verbal predicate, it may contain a nominal predicate, an adjectival predicate, in Semitic languages also an adverbial predicate or even a prepositional predicate. In Egyptian-Coptic, however, as in the majority of African languages, sentences with adverbial or prepositional predicate show a distinctly different structure.
  The relation of nominal sentences to verbal sentences is a question of tense marking. In most languages with nominal sentences such as Russian, Arabic and Hebrew, the copular verb does not surface in indicatival present tense sentences. Conversely, these languages allow the copular verb in non-present sentences.
context_section_description: To successfully account for the syntactic structure of a nominal sentence, there must either be a change in the phrase structure rules or a zero copula must be assumed. This is because nominal sentences cannot be accounted for using traditional phrase structure rules, which state: TP → {NP/ CP} (T) (VP). In other words, a tense phrase must consist of a noun phrase or complementizer phrase, an optional tense head, and a verb phrase. Less technically, this means each sentence must have a noun and verb component. Because there is no overt verb in a nominal sentence, this creates a challenge for the theory.
  Taking an Arabic sentence like ʾanā saʿīd (أنا سعيد), literally "I happy", which is fully grammatical in the language, we see that there is a pronoun, ʾanā and an adjective, saʿīd. The first satisfies the sentence requirement of having a noun, but the latter being an adjective, our verb requirement remains unfulfilled. In order to allow this construction, we would have to revise our theory to state *TP → NP {VP/AP} (the * indicates that this is actually an ungrammatical construction), meaning you could have a sentence which breaks down to either a verb phrase or an adjective phrase (see the above figure). However, phrase structure rules are supposed to be universal, therefore this new rule would also allow us to generate "I happy" in English. Since this is not a grammatical, this is an issue that requires attention.
  Another problem is that each phrase must consist of a head which bears its name. Therefore, in a verb phrase, the head is always a verb. Again, nominal sentences like ʾanā saʿīd do not have a verb, so the verb head position in the verb phrase cannot be filled.
  Having a zero copula is one way to solve the problems listed above without compromising the existing syntactic theory. The verb is present, just covertly as "null".
  Using X-bar theory, it is possible to both account for the grammaticality of constructions such as "I happy" as well as explain how the subject DP is derived. In X-bar theory, there are no obligatory lexical categories that make up a sentence; instead, there are only general X-bar rules: the specifier rule, adjunct rule, and complement rule. Therefore, the theory accurately permits the AP "happy" as grammatical even without a verb since AP can be a complement to the T head (see aside).
  
  Additionally, under the VP-internal subject hypothesis, the subject "I" will be generated in the specifier of VP and, using the DP movement, it will move to the specifier position of TP. Consequently, the resulting surface structure of the nominal sentence "I happy" is properly generated under this analysis.
caption: English and Arabic trees of "I am happy"
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