The purpose of this thesis is threefold: 1) to analyze the Chamorro equivalent of the English sentence constructions containing the verb "to be", 2) to contrast the English verb "to be" in English syntax with the Chamorro functional equivalents in Chamorro syntax, and 3) to provide a philosophical discussion of "to be" as a lexical item and as a synonym of "to exist".Relevant sections of the Lingua Descriptive Studies Questionnaire are used in Analyzing sentence constructions in Chamorro that are equivalent to English sentences with the verb "to be". This descriptive framework permits a description of the Chamorro sentence constructions that is neutral to any particular current theory of language. Such a neutral description facilitates comparison of structures between two languages and makes the data more generally useful to linguists of a variety of theoretical persuations.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2000. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 196-204). Available also in a digital version from Dissertation Abstracts.