copula

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linking verb

Linking verbs (also known as copulas or copular verbs) are used to describe the state of being of the subject of a clause. Unlike action verbs (also called dynamic verbs), they connect the subject to the predicate of the clause without expressing any action.
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copula

Logic the often unexpressed link between the subject and predicate terms of a categorial proposition, as are in all men are mortal
Collins Discovery Encyclopedia, 1st edition © HarperCollins Publishers 2005
The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Copula

an auxiliary grammatical element of a compound predicate having a weakened lexical meaning and serving to express merely grammatical categories of the predicate, the lexical meaning being expressed by a nonconjugated, usually nominal, element. The verb “to be” is used as a copula in many languages. The presence of a copula may be obligatory, as in English and French; optional, as in Russian and Hungarian; determined by the type of nominal predicate, as in Swahili; or determined by the semantic character of the sentence, as in Khmer. Certain verbs besides “to be” can function as copulas; these verbs, which introduce an additional nuance to the meaning of the elements linked by the verb, include the Russian nachinat’ (“to begin”), stanovit’sia (“to become”), and delat’ (“to do,” “to make”).

The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 3rd Edition (1970-1979). © 2010 The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
References in periodicals archive ?
Of special interest are the PRS = FUT forms shared by the copular and existential verb--in both cases, the negation a is used, cf.
Even descriptors for Task Achievement and Coherence and Cohesion for the lowest bands in these rubrics, which feature almost no agentive language, still avoid language of (in)ability, instead opting for copular verbs, verbs of possession, and action verbs that are negated or otherwise mitigated, as seen in (14):
Relatives can also be formed from copular clauses, as in (17):
Predicate-types also differed: Narratives were anchored in lexical, mainly dynamic predicates while expository texts relied significantly more on stative predicates, in Hebrew often in the form of (verbless) copular constructions in the Present tense (Berman and Nir-Sagiv 2004).
Description SVM SVM classification [27] Min Min rule [44] Max Max rule [44] Hm Hamacher T-norm [24] LLR Logistic Linear Regression [31] LR-Cp Like ratio and copular [29] Fk Frank T-norm [24] N2 2 norm for classification [44] Ep Einstein product T-norm [24] Sum Sum rule [44] Yg Yager T-norm [24] LR-G Like ratio and Gaussian Mixture Model [30] [AA.sub.pro] Proposed Aczel-Alsina T-norm Table 2.
quadrilineatus Champion, las hembras pueden copular con uno y dos dias de edad, pero presentan un periodo de pre-oviposicion de 3,3 semanas.
The 16 papers explore such aspects of Slavic languages as the interplay of feature inheritance and information structure in Polish inverse copular sentences, a semantic analysis of Czech kind-denoting and group-denoting noun phrases, the rise of the indefinite article edin in Bulgarian, the syntax and semantics of directional axial expressions in Russian, trochaic lengthening in Neostokavian, the semantic compatibility of two Czech temporal adjuncts, and naturally-atomic singular noun-adjective construction kinds in Russian as lexically derived.
The ungrammaticality remains regardless of the form of the copular be (i.e., is/are).
Interestingly unergative verbs present the opposite side of the problem the generative grammarians face with reference to copular constructions.