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The copula "sein" "be" in German, together with its complements, refers to a stative situation. Besides offering argument positions in its Semantic Form SF, it has no other function. Stative verbs are not specified with respect to the beginning or the end of a described situation or with respect to the state before or after. I will take the verb "werden" "become, get" to be a copular verb as well. The only difference to "sein" is that "werden" refers to a nonstative or changing situation. I argue that "werden" is underspecified in two respects. Like motion verbs and successive patient verbs (SUK verbs in Krifka (1989)) "werden" switches between an unlimited and a limited process (accomplishment) dependent on its complement (cf. "älter werden" "get older" / "vorwärts gehen" "go forward" / "Tee trinken" "drink tea" vs. "alt werden" "get old" / "in das Zimmer gehen" "go into the room"/ "eine Tasse Tee trinken" "drink a cup of tea"). But "werden" is even more underspecified than these verbs; it is the only verb which covers all nonstative situations, not only processes and accomplishments but also punctual transitions (achievements), cf. "schwanger werden" "get pregnant". "Werden" is anything but stative. Whether there is a target state implied or not, or whether the transition to this target state is extensible or atomic, is the result of the composition of the meaning of "werden" and its intimal argument added by special meaning postulates. Hierarchically marked subtypes of situational arguments result as a side effect.
In contradistinction to main verbs copula verbs like 'sein', 'werden' or 'bleiben' ('be', 'become' or 'remain') can, though with some restrictions, take projections of all lexical categories as complements. Semantically 'werden' and 'bleiben' are considered to be dual operators, related to each other by inner and outer (= dual) negation. But there are contexts where 'bleiben' seems to assume the meaning of its dual 'werden'. What at first glance appears to be an idiosyncracy of German turns out to hold for Swedish, Brazil-Portuguese and other unrelated languages as well.
'Werden' is more restricted than 'sein' and 'bleiben', it cannot have a locative complement. 'Bleiben' has the widest distribution, it can also take infinitives of verbs of position as complement. But in this case 'stehen bleiben' is ambiguous between a "remain" -reading and a "become" -reading.
In 15th century the Swedish verb 'bliva' - a borrowing from German - has undergone a change from the "remain"-reading to the "become"-reading. The "become"-reading of 'bliva' (later form 'bli') is only blocked (as is the German verb 'werden') in the case of a locative complement, where the "remain"-reading has survived. The two readings of 'bli' do not produce any ambiguity, except when taking a verb of position as complement - much the same as in German.
The paper attempts to pinpoint the conditions that lead to this surprising shift of meaning between duals.
