Ph.D. Dissertation topic: Existential Phrases and Copulae in Akkadian and Other Semitic Languages – A Grammatical, Semantical, and Comparative Analysis

Advisors: Prof. Nathan Wasserman and Prof. Steve Fassberg

Abstract: One of the challenges of language research has to do with the ways in which a language expresses existence (or absence). Generally, existential phrases are propositions (a semantic feature) with a predicate that expresses the existence of an object and nothing beyond that (a pragmatic feature). Although native speakers of can easily recognize an existential phrase, the syntactic definitions of such phrases, as well as the grammatical rules to which they obey are, often, elusive.  Further, in many languages, words or phrases expressing existence are also used as copulae, which makes segregating between copulative and existential uses of certain words hard.

In my Ph.D. work I intend to: (1) Collect Akkadian existential markers, (2) Explore the means used in Akkadian to express existence, and to describe the syntactic and semantic surrounding of Akkadian existential markers, (3) Define and describe Akkadian copulae, and to analyze the grammatical and semantical features distinguishing between copulative and existential usage of the Akkadian markers, (4) Collect existential markers in other Semitic languages and  to compare them to the Akkadian ones to find which markers are “Semitic” and which are Akkadian innovations, (5) Track the ways in which Akkadian existential markers changed across dialects and millennia.