The Haitian Creole copula and types of predication: A Word-and-Pattern account

Haitian Creole is a French-based creole language spoken by about 10 millions people in Haiti. In Haitian Creole the copula consists in the two forms se and ye and it may not be expressed. The present paper argues that, despite claims to the contrary, the Haitian Creole copula is a verbal lexeme realized through two overt suppletive stems and a phonologically null stem. Selecting one stem or the other does not depend on inherent and/or contextual inflectional features as in English am vs. is vs. was vs. were, but on the syntax and semantics of the predicate headed by the copula lexeme