A diachronic view on non-verbal predication Caterina Mauri, Andrea Sansò 1. Introduction and outline In this chapter we set out to discuss some issues concerning the diachrony of non-verbal predication. The first issue is what diachronic sources can be singled out for copula constructions. Secondly, we discuss how predicative inflection constructions, as defined by the Position Paper (Creissels, Bertinetto, and Ciucci, this volume), emerge, based on the available evidence. Thirdly, we try to answer two related questions, namely whether or not non-verbal sources of copula constructions tend to acquire verbal characteristics in the course of time, and, conversely, whether or not verbal sources of copula constructions tend to lose verbal characteristics when developing into copulas. The chapter is organized as follows. Section 2 deals with the main sources of copulas attested cross-linguistically. These include verbal sources such as existential and postural verbs, as well as verbs meaning ‘become’, ‘come’ and ‘see’, and non-verbal sources such as demonstratives, third person pronouns, and indefinite articles. Section 3 discusses the processes through which predicative inflection constructions come about, while Section 4 is devoted to morphosyntactic changes that characterize the various diachronic trajectories from the source to the target. Other issues such as the sources of functive marking (i.e. the use of markers functionally similar to English as) are also discussed in Section 4. Finally, some conclusive remarks are presented in Section 5. 2. Sources of copulas This section is devoted to a survey of the main sources of copulas. In §2.1, we will discuss copulas originating from verbs, in §2.2, non-verbal sources of copular elements. 2.1. Copulas from verbs