Nominal sentence and copula in the history of linguistics: the case of Aymara

This paper examines the concept of nominal sentence in the linguistic thought of missionary grammarians. This concept, which has been understudied in the linguistic historiography of the early modern age, pro- 5 vides a better understanding of the concept of sentence in Western grammatical tradition. I will attempt to assess the linguistic awareness of European grammarians about the existence of nominal sentences in Aymara, an indigenous South American language. Indeed, both ancient and modern Aymara lack a verb ‘to be’ as it is understood in Indo-European languages (cf. Benveniste 1960; Kahn 2003 [1973]). Both locative/existential and copulative functions are, in fact, expressed through morphological and syntactic 10 rather than lexical strategies. A close textual analysis shows that, based on the traditional Graeco-Latin model, the first grammars of Aymara (Bertonio 1603; Torres Rubio 1616) fail to correctly identify the nominal sentence construction, which in current linguistic studies is widely recognized as a cross-linguistic phenomenon (cf. Stassen 1994, 1997; Bauer 2000). As a result, the European missionaries were forced to ascribe to Aymara a full lexical verb ‘to be’ that does not exist in that language (cf. Adelaar 15 2004, 2020; Cerrón-Palomino 2000). I will argue how both locative and copulative morphemes in Aymara are the result of a grammaticalization process that gives rise to verbalizing suffixes, originating from spatial demonstratives (cf. Diessel 1999; Dixon 2003; Pustet 2003).