Copula (linguistics)
The word copula derives from the Latin noun for a "link" or "tie" that connects two different things.
In ontology it is sometimes suggested that the "is" of existence is reducible to the "is" of property attribution or class membership; to be, Aristotle held, is to be something.
However, Abelard in his Dialectica made a reductio ad absurdum argument against the idea that the copula can express existence.
In many languages the principal copula is a verb, like English (to) be, German sein, Mixtec kuu,[9] Touareg emous,[10] etc.
In some other languages, like Beja and Ket, the copula takes the form of suffixes that attach to a noun but are distinct from the person agreement markers used on predicative verbs.
The origins of the copulas of most Indo-European languages can be traced back to four Proto-Indo-European stems: *es- (*h1es-), *sta- (*steh2-), *wes- and *bhu- (*bʰuH-).
Additional archaic forms include art, wast, wert, and occasionally beest (as a subjunctive).
[19] The following table shows the conjugations of the copula होना honā ہونا in the five grammatical moods in the simple aspect.
The resulting distinction in the modern forms is found in all the Iberian Romance languages, and to a lesser extent Italian, but not in French or Romanian.
In Irish and Scottish Gaelic, there are two copulas, and the syntax is also changed when one is distinguishing between states or situations and essential characteristics.
Describing the subject's state or situation typically uses the normal VSO ordering with the verb bí.
[21] To describe being in a state, condition, place, or act, the verb "to be" is used: Tá mé ag rith.
'[22] The North Levantine Arabic dialect, spoken in Syria and Lebanon, has a negative copula formed by ما mā / ma and a suffixed pronoun.
[23] In Chichewa, a Bantu language spoken mainly in Malawi, a very similar distinction exists between permanent and temporary states as in Spanish and Portuguese, but only in the present tense.
For a permanent state, in the 3rd person, the copula used in the present tense is ndi (negative sí):[24][25] For the 1st and 2nd persons the particle ndi is combined with pronouns, e.g., ine 'I': For temporary states and location, the copula is the appropriate form of the defective verb -li: For the 1st and 2nd persons the person is shown, as normally with Chichewa verbs, by the appropriate pronominal prefix: In the past tenses, -li is used for both types of copula: In the future, subjunctive, or conditional tenses, a form of the verb khala 'sit/dwell' is used as a copula: Uniquely, the existence of the copulative verbalizer suffix in the Southern Peruvian Aymaran language variety, Muylaq' Aymara, is evident only in the surfacing of a vowel that would otherwise have been deleted because of the presence of a following suffix, lexically prespecified to suppress it.
As the copulative verbalizer has no independent phonetic structure, it is represented by the Greek letter ʋ in the examples used in this entry.
Consider the verb sara-, which is inflected for the first person simple tense and so, predictably, loses its final root vowel: sar(a)-ct-wa 'I go'.
The fact that the final vowel of -iri below is not suppressed indicates the presence of an intervening segment, the copulative verbalizer: sar(a)-iri-ʋ-t-wa 'I usually go'.
In both examples, as in Georgian, this participle is used together with the present and the past forms of the verb in order to conjugate for the perfect and the pluperfect aspects.
The use of a zero copula is unknown in French, and it is thought to be an innovation from the early days when Haitian-Creole was first developing as a Romance-based pidgin.
In the most basic case, it behaves like a normal verb with irregular forms, which (like most copulas crosslinguistically) takes a non-case-marked complement instead of an object.
The following two sentences differ only in the fact that the first is appropriate only between decently close friends or family, or said by someone of significantly higher social status than the listener, and the second is only appropriate outside of such circumstances.
In these situations, the copula is not serving as an actual predication device; it is only a means to supply formality marking.
This includes the topic marker wa, due to negative copula sentences typically implying some kind of contrastive topic-like force on the complement.
This has largely been incorporated into Japanese's sentence-final particle system, and is far more common than the equivalent English structure.
(noun phrase indicator)' Before the Han dynasty, the character 是 served as a demonstrative pronoun meaning "this" (this usage survives in some idioms and proverbs.)
Some linguists believe that 是 developed into a copula because it often appeared, as a repetitive subject, after the subject of a sentence (in classical Chinese we can say, for example: "George W. Bush, this president of the United States" meaning "George W. Bush is the president of the United States).
Another use of 是 in modern Chinese is in combination with the modifier 的 de to mean "yes" or to show agreement.
But, in order to express that that person is THE doctor (say, that had been phoned to help), one must use another copula iyé 'to be the one': pežútamedicine-manwičhášaDEF(kiŋ)ARTmiyéI-am-the-oneyelóMALE ASSERTpežúta wičháša (kiŋ) miyé yelómedicine-man DEF ART I-am-the-one MALE ASSERT'I am the doctor'In order to refer to space (e.g., Robert is in the house), various verbs are used, e.g., yaŋkÁ (lit., 'to sit') for humans, or háŋ/hé 'to stand upright' for inanimate objects of a certain shape.
The word cu is used to prevent lo pendo be mi zgipre, which would mean "the friend-of-me type of musician".
