Zero copula is a linguistic phenomenon whereby the subject is joined to the predicate without overt marking of this relationship (like the copula "to be" in English). One can distinguish languages that simply do not have a copula and languages that have a copula that is optional in some contexts.
Many languages exhibit this in some contexts, including Assamese, Bengali, Kannada, Malay/Indonesian, Filipino/Tagalog, Turkish, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Hindi, Guarani, Kazakh, Turkmen, Japanese, Ukrainian, Russian, Belarusian, Tatar, Azerbaijani, Swahili, Hungarian, Hebrew, Arabic, Berber,[1] Ganda, Hawaiian, Sinhala, Irish, Welsh, Nahuatl, Māori, Mongolian, Greenlandic, Lithuanian, Latvian, Polish, Slovak, Quechua and American Sign Language.
Dropping the copula is also found, to a lesser extent, in English and many other languages, used most frequently in rhetoric, casual speech, non-standard varieties, and headlinese, the writing style used in newspaper headlines. Sometimes, these omissions cause unintended syntactic ambiguity.
See also: Nominal sentence. Standard English exhibits a few limited forms of the zero copula. One is found in comparative correlatives like "the bigger, the better" and "the more the merrier". However, no known natural language lacks this structure, and it is not clear how a comparative is joined with its correlate in this kind of copula.[2] Zero copula also appears in casual questions and statements like "you from out of town?" and "enough already!" where the verb (and more) may be omitted due to syncope. It can also be found, in a slightly different and more regular form, in the headlines of English newspapers, where short words and articles are generally omitted to conserve space. For example, a headline would more likely say "Parliament at a standstill" than "Parliament is at a standstill". Because headlines are generally simple, in "A is B" statements, an explicit copula is rarely necessary.
Zero copulae are very common in sports announcing. For example: "Johnson already with two hits today." "Unitas with a lot of time."
The zero copula is far more common in some varieties of Caribbean creoles and African American Vernacular English,[3] where phrases like "Where you at?" and "Who she?" can occur.[4] As in Russian and Arabic, where the copula can only be omitted in the present tense, the copula can only be omitted in African American Vernacular English when it can be contracted in Standard American English.
Omission frequently depends on the tense and use of the copula.
In Assamese zero copula is usually used in the present tense with a prepositional phrase or the adverb 'here' or 'there'. For example, in the sentence, Assamese: আমি ইয়াত (Assamese: Ami iat, "We are here"), the copula Assamese: আছোঁ (Assamese: Aaso) is omitted.
In Russian the copula Russian: быть (Russian: byt’) is normally omitted in the present tense, but not in the past and "future tenses":
Present (omitted):
Past (used):
The third person plural Russian: суть (Russian: sut’, "are") is still used in some standard phrases, but since it is a homonym of the noun "essence", most native speakers do not notice it to be a verb:
The verb Russian: быть (Russian: byt’) is the infinitive of "to be". The third person singular, Russian: есть (Russian: yest’), means "is". As a copula, it can be inflected into the past (Russian: был, Russian: byl), "future" (Russian: будет, Russian: budet), and conditional (Russian: был бы, Russian: byl by) forms. A present tense (Russian: есть, Russian: yest’) exists; however, it is almost never used as a copula, but rather omitted altogether or replaced by the verb Russian: являться (Russian: yavlyat'sa, "to be in essence"). Thus one can say:
But not usually:
But in some cases the verb Russian: быть in the present tense (form Russian: есть) is employed: Russian: Будь тем, кто ты есть (Be who you are).
The present tense of the copula in Russian was in common use well into the 19th century (as attested in the works of Fyodor Dostoyevsky) but is now used only for archaic effect (analogous to "thou art" in English).
There is a contrast between the regular verb "to be" (Turkish: [[wikt:olmak|olmak]]) and the copulative/auxiliary verb "to be" (Turkish: [[wikt:imek|imek]]) in Turkish.
The auxiliary verb Turkish: imek shows its existence only through suffixes to predicates that can be nouns, adjectives or arguably conjugated verb stems, arguably being the only irregular verb in Turkish. In the third person, zero copula is the rule, as in Hungarian or Russian. For example:
| align=left | align=right | align=left | |||
| Turkish: Deniz mavi. | "[The] sea [is] blue." | (the auxiliary verb Turkish: i-mek is implied only); | |||
| Turkish: Ben maviyim. | "I am blue." | (the auxiliary verb Turkish: i-mek appears in Turkish: (y)im.) |
The essential copula is possible in the third person singular:
| align=left | align=right | align=left | |||
| Turkish: Deniz mavidir. | "[The] sea is (always, characteristically) blue." |
In Tatar, Tatar: dir expresses doubt rather than a characteristic. The origin of Tatar: dir is the verb Tatar: durmak, with a similar meaning to the Latin Latin: stare.
In the modern Tatar language copula is a disappearing grammatical phenomenon and is only rarely used with the first and second person (while the third person copula has fallen completely out of use).[5] In the past there was a full paradigm for all persons:
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| Singular | Plural | ||||
| I person | -мын/-мен | -быз/-без | |||
| II person | -сың/-сең | -сыз/-сез | |||
| III person | -дыр/-дер (-тыр/тер) | -дыр/-дер (-тыр/тер) |
For example: Tatar: Мин укытучымын (Tatar: Min ukıtuçımın, "I'm a teacher"), Tatar: Син укытучысың (Tatar: Sin ukıtuçısıñ, "You're a teacher"), Tatar: Ул укытучыдыр (Tatar: Ul ukıtuçıdır, "He/She's a teacher"). While the copulas for the first and second person are historically derived from personal pronouns, the third person copula comes from the verb Tatar: тор (Tatar: tor, "stand, live, exist"). For negation the copula affix is attached to the negative particle Tatar: түгел (Tatar: tügel): Tatar: Мин язучы түгелмен (Tatar: Min yazuçı tügelmen, "I'm not a writer"). The copula is only used with nouns. Sometimes the noun can be in the locative case: Tatar: Сез өйдәсез (Tatar: Sez öydäsez, "You are at home").
In Japanese, the copula is not used with predicative adjectives, such as . It is sometimes omitted with predicative nouns and adjectival nouns in non-past tense, such as, but is necessary for marking past tense or negation, as in . It is also sometimes omitted in wh-questions, such as .
In Māori, the zero copula can be used in predicative expressions and with continuous verbs (many of which take a copulative verb in many Indo-European languages) — Maori: He nui te whare, literally "a big the house", "the house (is) big"; Maori: I te tēpu te pukapuka, literally "at (past locative particle) the table the book", "the book (was) on the table"; Maori: Nō Ingarangi ia, literally "from England (s)he", "(s)he (is) from England"; Maori: Kei te kai au, literally "at the (act of) eating I", "I (am) eating"
In Arabic, a Semitic language, the use of the zero copula again depends on the context. In the present tense affirmative, when the subject is definite and the predicate is indefinite, the subject is simply juxtaposed with its predicate. When both the subject and the predicate are definite, a pronoun (agreeing with the subject) may be inserted between the two. For example:
The extra pronoun is highly recommended in order for one not to confuse the predicate for a qualifying adjective:
(This is just a noun phrase with no copula. See al- for more on the use of definite and indefinite nouns in Arabic and how it affects the copula.)
In the past tense, however, or in the present tense negative, the verbs Arabic: kāna and Arabic: laysa are used, which take the accusative case:
When the copula is expressed with a verb, no pronoun need be inserted, regardless of the definiteness of the predicate:
Hebrew, another Semitic language, uses zero copula in a very similar way.
The Ganda verb "to be", Ganda: -li, is used in only two cases: when the predicate is a prepositional phrase and when the subject is a pronoun and the predicate is an adjective:
Otherwise, the zero copula is used:
Here the word Ganda: mulungi, "beautiful" is missing its initial vowel pre-prefix Ganda: o-. If included, it would make the adjective qualify the noun Ganda: omuwala attributively:
American Sign Language does not have a copula. For example, "my hair is wet" is signed my hair wet, and "my name is Pete" may be signed [MY NAME]topic P-E-T-E.
The copula Irish: is is used in Irish but may be omitted in the present tense. For example, Irish: Is fear mór é ("He is a big man") can be expressed as simply Irish: Fear mór é. The common phrase Irish: Pé scéal é (meaning "anyhow", lit. "Whatever story it [is]") also omits the copula.
The fact that Welsh often requires the use of a predicative particle to denote non-definite predicates means that the copula can be omitted in certain phrases. For example, the phrase Welsh: Ac yntau'n ddyn byr... ("Since he is/was/etc. a short man...") literally translates as "And he [particle] a short man...". The zero copula is especially common in Welsh poetry of the Welsh: [[Medieval Welsh literature|gogynfardd]] style.
Nahuatl, as well as some other Amerindian languages, has no copula. Instead of using a copula, it is possible to conjugate nouns or adjectives like verbs.
Grammarians and other comparative linguists, however, do not consider this to constitute a zero copula but rather an affixal copula. Affixal copulae are not unique to Amerindian languages but can be found, for instance, in Korean and in the Eskimo languages.
Many indigenous languages of South America do, however, have true zero copulae in which no overt free or bound morpheme is present when one noun is equated with another. In fact, zero-copula is likely to occur in third-person contexts in Southern Quechua (notice wasiqa hatunmi 'the house is big' vs. wasiqa hatunmi kan 'the house is big', where kan, the Quechua copula, is not really needed, as suggested by the first sentence).
Yaghan, from Tierra del Fuego, used, in its heyday back in the mid-19th century, zero copula as one option, when introducing new participants in discourse, but had a slew of posture-based copular verbs for all other contexts. So I could say, kvnji-u:a Jon (lit. 'this man IS John'(zero copula). kvnji 'this', u:a 'man' (v here is schwa, and colon marks tenseness of the vowel preceding it), but once John has been introduced I might say, Jon lvpatvx-wvshta:gu:a mu:ta 'John is a woodworker', lvpatvx 'wood' (x voiceless velar fricative), wvshta:gu: 'work' u:a 'man', mu:ta irregular present tense form of mu:tu: 'to be (sitting) (or occupied doing)'
Modern Standard Chinese, as well as many other Chinese dialects, uses a copula, such as the Mandarin word shì (是), before nouns in predications, like in Wŏ shì Zhōngguó rén (我是中国人 / I am Chinese), but not usually before verbs or adjectives. For example, saying Wǒ shì kāixīn (我是开心 / I am happy) is a grammatically incorrect sentence, but saying Wǒ kāixīn (我开心 / I happy), is correct. Adverbs can be added to the adjective, like in Wǒ hĕn kāixīn (我很开心 / I very happy). A copula may be used for adjectives, however, if the particle de (的) is added after the adjective, like in Wǒ shì kāixīn de (我是开心的).
Somewhat similar to Chinese, the Vietnamese language requires the copula Vietnamese: là before nouns in predications but does not use a copula before verbs or adjectives, thus Vietnamese: Tôi '''là''' sinh viên (I am a student) but Vietnamese: Tôi giỏi (I [am] smart). The topic marker Vietnamese: thì may appear before an adjective to emphasize the subject, for example Vietnamese: Tôi '''thì''' giỏi (As for me, I am smart). Many prepositions in Vietnamese originated as verbs and continue to function as verbs in sentences that would use a copula in English. For example, in Vietnamese: Tôi '''ở''' nhà (I am at home), the word Vietnamese: ở may be analyzed as either "to be at" or simply "at". Sometimes, attributive adjectives may follow the verb có (to have), thus Tôi (có) cao is a feasible sentence.