Nominal sentence
In Egyptian-Coptic, however, as in the majority of African languages, sentences with adverbial or prepositional predicate show a distinctly different structure.
Historically, nominal sentences have posited much controversy regarding their identity as an existent linguistic phenomenon.
Ancient grammatical tradition did not uncover such sentences, or if they did, they were only found as an exception to the language structure.
Arab grammarians did not feel as bound by the classical grammatical categories as did the European counterparts of that historical period.
Moving forward in the historical time period, Orientalists later borrowed the nominal sentence terminology from the early Arab grammarians, however modified it slightly to be defined solely with respect to the absence of the verbal predicate, rather than with respect to the first word of the sentence (the noun) that may or may not have a verb in it, as the Arab grammarians defined it.
This slight shift in the definition of nominal sentences corresponds partly to both the Western and the Arabic grammar tradition.
This is because nominal sentences cannot be accounted for using traditional phrase structure rules, which state: TP → {NP/ CP} (T) (VP).
Having a zero copula is one way to solve the problems listed above without compromising the existing syntactic theory.
Using X-bar theory, it is possible to both account for the grammaticality of constructions such as "I happy" as well as explain how the subject DP is derived.
A verbless sentence in Arabic (جملة اسمية jumla ismiyya) does not consist of a subject but rather a topic followed by a predicate.
That is, the past feature has to always be indicated morphologically to convey accurate information of (+past), unlike the present which can be referred to as tenseless.
In Hungarian, the copular verb simply expresses something that exists, such as something, someone, a place, or even time, weather, a material, an origin, a cause or purpose.
aniIpohereani poI hereI am hereha-susthe horseyafebeautifulha-sus yafe{the horse} beautifulthe horse is beautiful[17]In ancient Indo-European languages, verb inflections and context both play a significant role in determining the structure of the sentence as well as their translations to other languages.
Verb inflections are used to indicate person (first, second or third), number (singular, dual or plural), tense, voice, and mood.
[20] Thus for the examples below, the omitted copular verb only acts and implies a connection between the subject and predicate.
Due to the missing verbal inflections, only the suffixes that are attached to the nominal predicates can be used to determine such things as number and possession.
