Copula sentences and entailment relations

In her proposal Claudia Maienborn attempts to provide evidence above all for the following basic claims: First, stative verbal expressions, regardless of whether they represent stage-level or individual-level predicates, pattern with eventive expressions in introducing a hidden referential argument which can be located in time and may serve as an antecedent for anaphoric reference. What separates statives from eventives is that their arguments are not dynamic but static entities, that is, states. Secondly, statives do not form a homogeneous class of expressions. While verbs like stand, sit, and sleep pass all of the relevant eventuality diagnostics, pattering also in this respect with eventives, copula constructions as well as verbs like know, hate, and resemble fail most of these tests. As a result, the expressions refer to states of two radically di¤erent ontological kinds – Davidsonian states (or D-states) and Kimian states (or Kstates), respectively. Thirdly, the K-state argument of copula constructions has its source not in the predicate combined with the copula but in the copula itself. Accordingly, the copula di¤ers from other K-state verbs in having no specific content but only providing an argument position that can be filled by nominal, adjectival or prepositional predicates. I am in agreement with Maienborn about the first claim. Actually, in Dölling (1999, 2003), it is explicitly argued against an approach, which strictly separates copula sentences from other ones in supposing that the former do not refer to states as reified entities but at best to abstract time