To be and to be (2)

And there is another verb “to be”, like this:

  • Positive: Is mise Calum. (I am Calum.)
  • Interrogative: An tusa Ealasaid? (Are you Elizabeth?)
  • Negative: Cha mise Calum. (I amn’t Calum.)
  • Negative interrogative: Chan esan Uilleam? (Aren’t you William?)

However, is doesn’t have type (S/NP)/NP because you can’t say

*Is tidsear Calum. (Calum is a teacher.)

(The star indicates that a sentence is ungrammatical.) You also can’t say

* Is tidsear mi. (I am a teacher.)

So we can, for now, assign it type (S/Nper)/PN, where Nper is a personal pronoun and PN is a proper noun. But let me assure you it gets much harder.

Coming soon: How to say that I am a teacher.

(Edit 2013-10-24: changed the word order in the ungrammatical examples to make them merely ungrammatical and not both ungrammatical and weird.)

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