CopulaIn linguistics, a copula is a word that is used to link the subject of a sentence with a predicate (a subject complement or an adverbial). Though it might not itself express any action or condition, it serves to associate the subject with a predicate that could not stand by itself. A copula is sometimes (though not always) a verb or a verb-like part of speech. (in English primary education grammar courses it is often called a linking verb). The term is generally used to refer to the main copular verb in the language: in the case of English, this is "to be". It can also be used to refer to all such verbs in the language: in that case, English copulas include, "to be", "to become", "to get" and "to seem".
The copula in EnglishUseWe can identify several sub-uses of the copula:
The copula "to be" also has some non-copular uses, including:
Note that the auxiliary verb function derives from the copular function; and, depending on one's point of view, one can still interpret the verb as a copula and the following verbal form as being adjectival. ConjugationAs in most Indoeuropean languages, the English copula is the most irregular verb, due to constant use. Most English verbs (traditionally known as "weak verbs") have just four separate forms, e.g. "start", "starts", "starting", started". A large minority of verbs (traditionally known as "strong verbs") have five separate forms, e.g. "begin", "begins", "beginning", "began", "begun". "To be" is a very special case in having eight forms: "be", "am", "is", "are", "being", "was", "were", "been". Traditionally, it had even more, including "art", and "wert". In philosophyIn ontology, philosophical discussions of the word "be" and its conjugations takes place over the meaning of the word is, the third person singular form of 'be', and whether the other senses can be reduced to one sense. For example, 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. Of course, the gerund form of "be", being, is its own (vexed) topic: see being and existence. The copula in other languagesLanguages tend to use the copula in quite different ways. In Indo-European languages, the words meaning "to be" (originating in stem *es) often sound similar to each other. Due to the high frequence of their use, their inflection retains a considerable degree of similarity in some cases. Thus, for example, the English form is is an apparent cognate of Russian jest', in spite the fact that the two belong to language groups that had split at least three thousand years ago and have had very little interaction since (twentieth-century borrowings notwithstanding). ChineseIn Chinese, both states and qualities are generally expressed with specific state verbs, without a copula, e.g. a verb "to be tired" (累 lèi), a verb "to be hungry" (饿 è), a verb "to be located at" (在 zài), a verb "to be stupid" (笨 bèn) and so forth. These descriptive verbs are usually preceded by an adverb such as 很 hěn ("very") or 不 bù ("not"). Only sentences with a noun as the complement (e.g. "this is my sister") use a specific verb "to be": 是 shì. This is used frequently: for example, instead of having a verb meaning "to be Chinese", they say "to be a Chinese person", using 是 shì. N.B. The transcriptions given in italics reflect standard Mandarin pronunciation and use the Pinyin system. JapaneseJapanese has two verbs translating as "to be": ある aru for existence, used of inanimate objects and plants; いる iru for the same, used of animals and people. Another form of the copula, だ da, cannot be given a corresponding part of speech in English, but is used to equate nouns and to attribute な na adjectives. In formal speech, its formal conjugation です desu is used to attribute い i adjectives as well. In informal speech, だ is unnecessary when using an い adjective. Note: Japanese verbs and adjectives conjugate differently depending on the level of politeness. All examples are shown with the "plain" form, used between friends. Japanese syntax is very different from English, with verbs coming at the end of the sentence. The translations are literal translations, and cannot be compared word-for-word with English. For example, to say that "the book is on the table" in Japanese, you would use ある aru.
Romance languagesA feature of most Romance languages is the coexistence of two different verbs meaning "to be", the main one from the Latin SVM, and a secondary one from STO. The essential different is that the former usually refers to essential characteristics, whilst the latter refers to states and situations, e.g. "Bob is old" versus "Bob is here". In Spanish, for example, the quite high degree of verbal inflection, plus the existence of two copulae, means that there are 105 separate forms to express the eight of English, and one of Chinese. See Romance copula. Russian and HungarianIn languages such as Russian or Hungarian, nouns do not have a copula between them (Russian: ja chelovek "I'm a (hu)man"; Hungarian: ö ember "he is a (hu)man"). To recycle the above examples ("Bob is old" versus "Bob is here"), Hungarian only uses a copula in the latter case with regard to third person (singular/plural) (Róbert van itt), but not in the first example (Róbert öreg). This is to relate a subject to a more temporary condition/state taking place in space (very often in the sense of Lojban zvati). In Russian, the verb byt’ is the infinitive of "to be". The third person singular, jest’ means "is" (and, interestingly enough, it is a homonym of the infinitive "to eat"). As a copula, it can be inflected into the past (byl), future (budet) and subjunctive (byl, by) forms. A present tense (jest’) exists; however, it almost never used as a copula, but rather omitted altogether or replaced by the verb javlatsa (to be in essence). Thus one can say:
But not (except for archaic effect)
TurkishDespite being an extremely regular agglutinative language, Turkish forms its "being" verb differently from other verbs, just as "to be" in English has twice as many forms as most of its other verbs. Artificial languagesThe artificial language Lojban has no copula at all, because all words that express a predicate can be used as verbs. The three sentences above would all have the same form in Lojban: la bob. bajra, la bob. tolcitno, and la bob. fagdirpre. The E-Prime language, based on English, simply avoids the issue by not having a generic copula. It requires instead a specific form such as "remains", "becomes", "lies", or "equals". Esperanto uses the copula much as in English. However, as with the rest of Esperanto grammar, there are no irregularities. The infinitive is esti, and the whole conjugation is regular. Existential usageThe existential usage of "to be" is distinct from and yet intimately related to its copulative usage. In language as opposed to formal logic, existence is a predicate rather than a quantifier, and the passage from copulative to existential usage can be subtle. For example:
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