The goal of this paper is to suggest a linguistically based principle to account for the distribution of overt vs. zero copulas in African American English. We will propose an approach based on Feature Interpretability and the Principle of Full Interpretation (Chomsky 1995). We suggest that, in Present Tense contexts, the copula is overt in presentational (as opposed to predicational) sentences to support the presence of a situation argument in INFL.