Zero copula


Zero copula is a linguistic phenomenon whereby the subject is joined to the predicate without overt marking of this relationship. 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, Turkish, Japanese, Ukrainian, Russian, Hungarian, Hebrew, Arabic, Berber, Ganda, Hawaiian, Sinhala, 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, and headlinese, the writing style used in newspaper headlines. Sometimes, these omissions cause unintended syntactic ambiguity.

In English

Standard English exhibits a few limited forms of the zero copula. One is found in comparative correlatives like "the higher, the better" and "". 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. Zero copula also appears in casual questions and statements like "you from out of town?" and "enough already!" where the verb 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.
The zero copula is far more common in some varieties of Caribbean creoles and African American Vernacular English, where phrases like "where you at?", and "who she?" can occur. As in Russian and Arabic, the copula can only be omitted in the present tense; the copula can only be omitted in African American Vernacular English where it can be contracted in Standard American English.

In other languages

Omission frequently depends on the tense and use of the copula.

Assamese

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, আমি ইয়াত, the copula আছোঁ is omitted.

Russian

In Russian the copula быть is normally omitted in the present tense, but not in the past and future tenses:
Present :
Past :
The third person plural суть 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 быть is the infinitive of "to be". The third person singular, есть means "is". As a copula, it can be inflected into the past, future, and conditional forms. A present tense exists; however, it is almost never used as a copula, but rather omitted altogether or replaced by the verb являться. Thus one can say:
But not usually:
But in some cases the verb быть in the present tense is employed: Будь тем, кто ты есть.
The present tense of the copula in Russian was in common use well into the 19th century but is now used only for archaic effect.

Turkic languages

There is a contrast between the regular verb "to be" and the copulative/auxiliary verb "to be" in Turkish.
The auxiliary verb 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:
The essential copula is possible in the third person singular:
In Tatar, dir expresses doubt rather than a characteristic. The origin of dir is the verb durmak, with a similar meaning to the Latin stare.

Japanese

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.

Māori

In Māori, the zero copula can be used in predicative expressions and with continuous verbs — He nui te whare, literally "a big the house", "the house big"; I te tēpu te pukapuka, literally "at the table the book", "the book on the table"; Nō Ingarangi ia, literally "from England he", "he from England"; Kei te kai au, literally "at the eating I", "I eating"

Arabic

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 may be inserted between the two. For example:
The extra pronoun is needed to prevent the adjective qualifying the noun attributively:
In the past tense, however, or in the present tense negative, the verbs kāna and 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.

Ganda

The Ganda verb "to be", -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 mulungi, "beautiful" is missing its initial vowel pre-prefix o-. If included, it would make the adjective qualify the noun omuwala attributively:
does not have a copula. For example, "my hair is wet" is signed my hair wet, and "my name is Pete" may be signed topic P-E-T-E.

Irish

The copula is is used in Irish but may be omitted in the present tense. For example, Is fear mór é can be expressed as simply Fear mór é. The common phrase Pé scéal é also omits the copula.

Welsh

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 Ac yntau'n ddyn byr... literally translates as "And he a short man...". The zero copula is especially common in Welsh poetry of the Medieval Welsh literature style.

Amerindian languages

, 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.

Literature