Series 2

The English copula verb ‘to be’ is realized in Igbo through the three verbs –nọ, -dị and  -bụ, while its Spanish equivalents are the two verbs ser and estar. This variation in the number of verbs to express ‘to be’ indicates that there is no 1:1 correspondence between the three languages with regard to their copula verbs.The present book is a first attempt at using a corpus-based approach to explore the Igbo copula verbs and compare them with those of the Spanish language. The work also draws on established literature on grammaticalization to examine the possible origin and characteristics of the typical copula verbs of the Igbo language. The enclosed cd contains the corpus data.

Overview of Chapters:
1. Introduction
2. Copula Verbs: an Overview
3. Ellogon Text Engineering Platform
4. Analysis of the Corpus Results for -bụ́, -dị́ and -nọ̀
5. Comparison of the Igbo and Spanish Copula Verbs
6. A Cross-Dialectal Comparison of -bụ́, -dị́ and -nọ̀
7. Grammaticalization
8. Conlusion