Copula The Copula In English Use Conjugation The Copula In

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".

1 The copula in English

1.1 Use

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.

1.2 Conjugation

As in most Indo-European 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".

2 The copula in other languages

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-century19th century 20th century 21st century more centuries) Decades: 1900s 1910s 1920s 1930s 1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s As a means of recording the passage of time, the 20th century was that century which lasted from 1901- 2000 in the sense of the Gre borrowings notwithstanding).

2.1 Chinese

In ChineseThe Chinese language (/, /, or ; pinyin: hany, huay, or zhongwen) is a member of the Sino-Tibetan family of languages. Although most Chinese view the many varieties of spoken Chinese as a single language, regional variations in spoken language are compara, 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 hen ("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 MandarinStandard Mandarin refers to the official Chinese spoken language used by the People's Republic of China, the Republic of China on Taiwan, and Singapore. Standard Mandarin is based on the Beijing dialect, which belongs to Mandarin, a group of Chinese diale pronunciation and use the PinyinPinyin (, pinyin) literally means "join together sounds" (a less literal translation being "phoneticize", "spell" or "transcription") in Chinese and usually refers to Hany pinyin (, literal meaning: " Han language pinyin"), which is a system of romanizati system.

2.2 Japanese

JapaneseThe Japanese language is a spoken and written language used mainly in Japan. The Japanese name for the language is Nihongo . History and classification Historical linguists do not all agree about the origin of the Japanese language; there are several comp 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 complex (な na) adjectives. In formal speech, its formal conjugation です desu is used to attribute regular (い i) adjectives as well. In informal speech, だ is unnecessary when using a regular 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 or by superiors to their inferiors. Japanese syntax is very different from English, for example with verbs coming at the end of the sentence. The translations are literal translations, so 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.

"The book is on the table." 本はテーブルにある。 (Hon wa te-buru ni aru.)
"Kim is here." キムはここにいる。 (Kimu wa koko ni iru.)
Noun equation: "I am an American." 私はアメリカ人だ。 (Watashi wa amerikajin da.)
Complex Adjective: "Amanda is strange." アマンダは変だ。 (Amanda wa hen da.)
Regular Adjective: "This is fun." これは楽しい。 (Kore wa tanoshii.)

2.3 Romance languages

A feature of most Romance languages is the coexistence of two different verbs meaning "to be", the main one from the LatinAlternative meanings: See Latin (disambiguation Latin was the language originally spoken in the region around Rome called Latium. It gained great importance as the formal language of the Roman Empire. All Romance languages are descended from Latin, and ma SVM, and a secondary one from STO. The essential difference 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 copulaThe copula or copulae (the verb or verbs meaning "to be") in all Romance languages derive from the Latin verbs SVM and STO . The former was the copular verb "to be", and the latter mainly meant "to stand", and was sometimes translatable as "to be". When L.

2.4 Russian and Hungarian

In languages such as Russian or Hungarian, nouns do not have a copula between them (Russian: ja chelovek "I'm a (hu)man"; Hungarian: o 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) (Itt van Róbert), but not in the first example (Róbert öreg). (Van = "is".) 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:

Ona byla krasivoj = "she was beautiful" (adjective in instrumental case)
Ona krasivaja = "she is beautiful" (adjective in the nominative case)
Ona javlajetsja krasivoj = "she is beautiful" (adjective also in instrumental)

But not (except for archaic effect)

*Ona jest’ krasivaja = "she is beautiful"

2.5 Turkish

Despite 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.

2.6 Artificial languages

The 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.

3 Existential usage

The 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:

Japanese: 我輩は猫である、名前はまだない。 Wagahai wa neko de aru, namae wa mada nai – I am a cat. As yet, I have no name. — Soseki Natsume
English: To be or not to be, that is the question. — Shakespeare
English: [Why climb Mount Everest?] Because it is there. — George Mallory
Russian: Страна, которую ищут дети, есть [Strana, kotoruju ishchut djeti, jest'] – That land we yearn for in our childhood is there. — Prishvin
French: Je pense, donc je suis. – I think, therefore I am. — Descartes
Latin: Cogito ergo sum. — I think, therefore I am. — Descartes

In 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.

Parts of speech

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