Copula

A copula is often a verb or a verb-like word, though this is not universally the case. citation A verb that is a copula is sometimes called a copulative or copular verb.

As noted above under zero copula, Russian and other East Slavic languages generally omit the copula in the present tense.

Colloquial Khmer is a zero copula language, instead preferring predicative adjectives (and even predicative nouns) unless using a copula for emphasis or to avoid ambiguity in more complex sentences.

For example, a statement of apparently equal identification, "The silly ban on copula continues," can be made without the copula assuming an identity rather than asserting it, consequently hampering our awareness of it.

In such cases only two orders are generally found: noun-copula-predicate and, much less commonly, predicate-copula-noun.

The possibility of copula omission is mentioned under Zero copula.

Zero copula main In some languages, copula omission occurs within a particular grammatical context.

Standard English allows null copula in certain sentences; for example, the sentence “He found it (to be) difficult” does not need to include “to be” in order to sound perfectly grammatical and natural to standard English speakers.

Additional uses of copular verbs A copular verb may also have other uses supplementary to or distinct from its uses as a copula.

Another auxiliary-type usage of the copula in English is together with the to-infinitive to denote an obligatory action or expected occurrence: "I am to serve you"; "The manager is to resign".

Another copula is du, which is a verb that means all its arguments are the same thing (equal).

Aristotle further distinguished (a) terms that could be the subject of predication, and (b) terms that could be predicated of others by the use of the copula ("is a").

Both of the sentences are acceptable and grammatically correct, but sentences with the copula are more formal.

Bresnan (2001:18f.) produces and discusses examples of subject-auxiliary inversion using the copula.

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): pežúta wičháša (kiŋ) miyé yeló (medicine-man DEF ART I-am-the-one MALE ASSERT).

Constructed languages The constructed language Lojban has multiple sorts of copula.

Esperanto uses the copula much as English.

Examples are given below (with the copula in bold and the predicative expression in italics): ::Mary and John are my friends.

For example, in both languages, the standard morphological mechanism for achieving the morphosyntactic copula is to simply execute the noun prefix syllable as murmured (or 'depressed').

Furthermore, adding "exists" to "a wise man", to give the complete sentence "a wise man exists" has the same effect as joining "some man" to "wise" using the copula.