Copula (linguistics) - Forms

Forms

In many languages the principal copula is a verb, such as English (to) be, German sein, French être, etc. This may inflect for grammatical categories such as tense, aspect and mood, like other verbs in the language. As a very commonly used verb, it is likely that the copula will have irregular inflected forms; this is the case in English, where the verb be has a number of highly irregular (suppletive) forms, and in fact has a larger number of different inflected forms than any other English verb (am, is, are, was, were, etc.; see English verbs for details).

Other copulas show more resemblances to pronouns. This is the case for Classical Chinese and Guarani, for instance. In highly synthetic languages, copulas are often suffixes, attached to a noun, that may still behave otherwise like ordinary verbs, for example -u- in Inuit languages. In some other languages, such as Beja and Ket, the copula takes the form of suffixes that attach to a noun but are distinct from the person agreement markers used on predicative verbs. This phenomenon is known as nonverbal person agreement (or nonverbal subject agreement) and the relevant markers are always established as deriving from cliticized independent pronouns.

For cases where the copula is omitted or takes zero form, see Zero copula below.