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Beginning with the early works of Aristotle, the interpretation of the verb to be runs through Western linguistic thought like Ariadne´s thread. As it unravels, it becomes intertwined with philosophy, metaphysics, logic, and even with mathematics - so much so that Bertrand Russell showed no hesitation in proclaiming that the verb to be was a disgrace to the human race. With the conviction that this verb penetrates modern linguistic thinking, creating scandal in its wake and, like a Trojan horse of linguistics, introducing disruptive elements that lead us to rethink radically the most basic structure of human language - the sentence - Andrea Moro reconstructs this history.

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Andrea Moro is Professor of General Linguistics at the Institute for Advanced Study (IUSS) in Pavia, Italy. He is the author of Dynamic Antisymmetry, Impossible Languages, and The Boundaries of Babel (all published by the MIT Press), and other books, including The Raising of Predicates and I Speak, Therefore I Am.

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