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.
Read more about this topic: Copula (linguistics)
Famous quotes containing the word forms:
“Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.”
—William James (1842–1910)
“Your letter is come; it came indeed twelve lines ago, but I
could not stop to acknowledge it before, & I am glad it did not
arrive till I had completed my first sentence, because the
sentence had been made since yesterday, & I think forms a very
good beginning.”
—Jane Austen (1775–1817)
“All forms of beauty, like all possible phenomena, contain an element of the eternal and an element of the transitory—of the absolute and of the particular. Absolute and eternal beauty does not exist, or rather it is only an abstraction creamed from the general surface of different beauties. The particular element in each manifestation comes from the emotions: and just as we have our own particular emotions, so we have our own beauty.”
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)