Lingthusiasm Episode 65: Knowledge is power, copulas are fun
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. The pen is mightier than the sword. Knowledge is power, France is bacon. These, ahem, classic quotes all have something linguistically interesting in common: they’re all formed around a particular use of the verb “be” known as a copula.
In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about copulas! This is a special name for a way of grammatically linking two concepts together that’s linguistically special in a lot of different languages: sometimes it’s a verb that’s super irregular (like be/is/was in English, Latin, and many other languages), sometimes it’s several verbs (like ser and estar in Iberian and Celtic languages), sometimes it’s a form of marking other words (like in Nahuatl, Auslan, and ASL), and sometimes it’s not even visible or audible at all (like zero copula in Arabic, African American English, and Russian). We also talk about some of the fun things you can do with copulas in English, such as the lexical gap that’s filled by “ain’t”, the news headline null copula, and the oddball philosophical experiment known as E-Prime.
Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here.
Announcements:
We're doing another online Lingthusiasm liveshow on April 9th (Canada) slash 10th (Australia)! (What time is that for me?) It will be a live Q&A for patrons about a fan fave topic: swearing! We'll be hosting this session on the Lingthusiasm patron Discord server. Become a patron before the event, and it will also be available as an edited-for-legibility recording in your usual Patreon live feed if you prefer to listen at a later date. In the meantime: tell us about your favourite examples of swearing in various languages and we might include them in the show!
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Here are the links mentioned in this episode:
France is Bacon dot com
Etymonline entry for copula
Lingthusiasm Episode ‘Schwa, the most versatile English vowel’
Wikipedia entry for copulas in Germanic languages
Etymonline entry for ‘be’ and ‘is’
Lingthusiasm Episode ‘That’s the kind of episode it’s - clitics’
Etymonline entry for ‘ain’t’
The Copula Systems of Western European Languages from a Typological and Diachronic Perspective - Britta Irslinger
Wikipedia entry for copulas in Chichewa
Wikipedia entry for verbs in Nepali
The Japanese Professor entry ‘The Copula ‘Desu’’
Lingthusiasm Episode ‘You heard about it but I was there - Evidentiality’
Wikipedia entry for verbs in Yolmo
David Bowles tweet on copulas in Nahuatl
Wikipedia entry for Nahuatl, including more detail on the geographic distribution of speakers
Australian Sign Language (Auslan): An Introduction to Sign Language Linguistics - Johnston and Schembri
Reddit post on how to express ‘be’ in American Sign Language
Wikipedia entry for zero copula
Lingthusiasm Episode ‘When nothing means something’
WALS entry for zero copula
All Things Linguistics entry on zero copula in African American English
Yale Grammatical Diversity Project English in North America entry for null copula
Wikipedia entry for E-Prime
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Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com
Gretchen is on Twitter as @GretchenAMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.
Lauren is on Twitter as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.
Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, our production manager is Liz McCullough, and our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.
Transcript Episode 65: Knowledge is power, copulas are fun
This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm Episode 65: Knowledge is power, copulas are fun. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the episode show notes page.
[Music]
Lauren: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Lauren Gawne.
Gretchen: I’m Gretchen McCulloch. Today we’re getting enthusiastic about copulas. But first, in April, we’re gonna be doing a live Q&A bonus episode for patrons which will be virtual and hanging out on our Discord.
Lauren: We’ll be returning to one of our most popular bonus episode topics for an entire Q&A about swearing.
Gretchen: Full disclosure – this will be a swearing episode with swears in it, so ask us your swear-y questions, get some swear-y answers. Go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm to find out how to become a patron and join the Discord for the liveshow, which will also be released as an edited May bonus episode if you’re not so keen on live audio chats.
Lauren: Patrons, get your questions ready and keep an eye out for more details closer to the event.
Gretchen: The LingComm grants are also happening again in 2022. These are grants to support projects who are bringing linguistics communication to broader audiences.
Lauren: Submissions are open until the end of March 2022. You can find out more details at LingComm.org. That’s “LingComm” with two Ms.
[Music]
Gretchen: I’ve been looking up some classic quotes lately.
Lauren: Have you been looking for some inspiration?
Gretchen: Yeah, well, I’m looking for some grammatical inspiration.
Lauren: Okay, let me hear some that have been speaking to you.
Gretchen: [Clears throat] Best quote-reading voice – “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” “The pen is mightier than the sword.”
Lauren: We’re really going for the cliches – I love it.
Gretchen: “Time is money,” Lauren.
Lauren: Okay. This might not be the reason other people browse classic quotes lists, but as far as I can tell, you’re into all of these because they have “is” or “was” in them.
Gretchen: That’s right.
Lauren: You’re looking for these tiny, little function words.
Gretchen: That’s absolutely right. I was looking for examples of copulas, and I thought I would try some classic quotes because quotes are sometimes very copular-ific. Can I tell you about my favourite?
Lauren: Yeah, have you got some more?
Gretchen: Okay. This one’s the best. It goes, “Knowledge is power. France is bacon.”
Lauren: I think you might have got confused here. I think this is a quote attributed to Francis Bacon.
Gretchen: No, no, no, the thing that I am quoting is actually the Reddit thread where somebody realised that they had been mishearing this quote their entire life as “France-copula-bacon” rather than by a guy named “Francis” whose surname was “Bacon.”
Lauren: When I was fact-checking this episode for us, I actually found an entire website franceisbacon.com that exclusively exists that has this anecdote on it. You can buy a t-shirt with the French flag in the shape of a strip of bacon.
Gretchen: Are not sponsored by franceisbacon.com. [Laughs]
Lauren: Truly a magic single-serve website – and a more surreal example of where you might put a copula.
Gretchen: In “France is bacon,” for example, the copula is doing this thing of linking the concept of “France” to say that it is like, somehow, the concept of “bacon.” A copula verb is from a Latin word meaning “linking” or “joining” or “combing.” That’s what it’s doing. It’s linking those two halves of the sentence and equating them.
Lauren: I assume that “co-” in “copula” is the same as like in “combine” and “coop” – that “with” “co-.”
Gretchen: Yes, it is. It is actually related to “copulate,” as you might wonder, but the grammatical sense is actually older than the other sense.
Lauren: There you go.
Gretchen: There you go. The thing that fascinates me about copulas is that they’re this, essentially, one word – although, “one word” with an asterisk because “is” and “was” and “were” and “am” and stuff, and “be,” are all forms of this one word – that gets its whole own name in grammatical description.
Lauren: I hadn’t really thought about that before. It reminds me of a schwa – how we have this one sound that has its own name that has nothing to do with its functions necessarily. It’s just so unique in the set of sounds for the schwa and verbs for copulas that they have their own name.
Gretchen: Normally, we talk about classes of verbs, you know, maybe these verbs all have both a subject and an object, and these verbs only have a subject, or something like that. You have transitive and intransitive. We often have names for groups of verbs, but “copula” gets to be its own thing because there isn’t really any other verb that’s exactly like “is” and “was” and that whole class of verbs.
Lauren: We should probably just mention as well that they don’t have to just occur in profound, inspirational quotes. Copulas pop up all over the place. You have a much more practical use such as, “Lingthusiasm is a podcast.”
Gretchen: “The Lingthusiasm logo is green.” “A podcast that is enthusiastic about linguistics,” indeed.
Lauren: These are nice because these examples show how the two things that get linked don’t have to always be the same types of things. You could link one noun with another noun – “Lingthusiasm” is a noun and “podcast” is a noun. But for something like, “The logo is green,” that’s an adjective, so it’s linking a noun to its attribute. Or you could link a noun with a location like, “The Lingthusiasm transcripts are on the Lingthusiasm website.”
Gretchen: Very nice. Or it could be a possession – “The Lingthusiasm podcast is ours.”
Lauren: Exactly. Linking here is a very broad concept of what can be linked.
Gretchen: I think the other reason why we have a special name for copulas is because, when it comes to the form of a copula – like if you wanna talk about “walk” as a verb, you can just be like, “Well, the verb, ‘walk,’ it does the following properties.” But if you wanna try to talk about copula as a verb, you’re left saying, “Well, the verb ‘is,’ which is also ‘was,’ which is also ‘be,’ which is also ‘were’ and ‘am,’ and ‘being’ and ‘been.’” It’s got so many forms compared to the relatively scarcity of forms that other verbs in English have.
Lauren: All these different forms are just part of the paradigm for this one verb. Even though they all look very differently, they’re treated as variations on the same verb when we’re thinking about how they function.
Gretchen: Because many languages – probably most languages, but I haven’t checked all 7,000 – have some form of copula, and it tends to be a very common thing to do to say that two things are roughly similar to each other, it’s a very common verb, so it’s more likely to be irregular in a lot of languages than other types of verbs that are a bit less common. It’s also useful to have this type of verb when you’re doing cross-linguistic comparisons to say, “How does the copula show up in these particular languages?” Because you’re relatively often dealing with a verb that has lots of irregular forms.
Lauren: That is maybe a thing you’ve encountered when leaning a new language is that, for the copula, you’re more likely to have to learn more than one way of dealing with it because we put up with a lot of irregularity in verbs that we use all the time. If we had very different forms of the verb “subscribe” – we don’t use that verb very much – it would be a lot more effort to retain all those different forms.
Gretchen: Exactly. Something that’s interesting about the copula forms in, at least, a lot of European languages is that they are often historically drawing some forms from one verb and some forms from another. They’ve been sort of smooshed together to make this “Franken-verb.” This is why we have the “be, been, being” forms, which are originally from one verb that’s traced back historically, and the “was, were” forms, which are traced back to a different verb. I think the “is, are” forms are from yet a third one. The same thing in French, you have the “suis – je suis; tu es; ils est” forms and then also, in the future tense, there’s forms with an F in a lot of Romance languages. That was smooshed together from another verb. There’s lots of weird stuff going on for historical reasons there.
Lauren: Another thing that can make copula hard to spot in the wild with English is that, because they are used so frequently, they get reduced a lot. They can just become even little clitics that stick on to the ends of other words. We have a whole episode on clitics and how they are commonly used forms that get reduced. So, “She’s a really great linguist” – that /s/ there is the copula as a reduced form. Or “I’m really enthusiastic about linguistics” – that /m/ there is that little bit of “am.”
Gretchen: There’s negative forms of the copula, too. You have “isn’t, aren’t, wasn’t.” One of the things that interests me is that there isn’t quite a mainstream English form of “am not” that’s contracted.
Lauren: “I am not” – yeah, that’s right. I don’t have “amn’t” in my variety of English.
Gretchen: “Amn’t” is found in Ireland and maybe a few other places, but it’s not in my English. I haven’t encountered it. Traditionally speaking, historically, if we wanted to use a contracted negation form of “am” and “not,” that’s actually “ain’t.”
Lauren: Ah, it is true. But “ain’t” has fallen out of favour and ruined the paradigm. It’s a very sad tale.
Gretchen: “Ain’t” has this stigmatised association because it was originally a contraction of “am not” and totally, reasonably used like that. It also began to be used as a generic contraction of “are not, is not, has not” and a bunch of other forms. That became associated with representations of stigmatised dialect – like Dickens representing Cockney. People started getting really angry about it and making it not a thing for as many people anymore. Now we’re left with this gap, which I don’t think is an improvement, really.
Lauren: Between the variety of functions, the irregularity of form, the ability to reduce it in certain contexts, no wonder copulas need their own name. They do so much.
Gretchen: They do so much. Again, most of our other verbs don’t get their own reduced forms. This is a thing that happens with really frequent stuff.
Lauren: Just to make things extra tricky with the copula, I have a couple of quotes to share back to you, Gretchen.
Gretchen: Thank you, please.
Lauren: “I think, therefore I am.” Of course, we couldn’t have a copula episode without talking about “to be, or not to be.” For both of these, there’s no linking happening.
Gretchen: There isn’t any linking happening. “I think, therefore I am,” “to be, or not to be” – to be what?
Lauren: That is the question.
Gretchen: [Laughs] Okay, I walked into that. If Hamlet is going around saying, “to be alive, or not to be alive,” or “to be Hamlet, or not to be Hamlet,” then he’d be using, technically speaking, a copula in its linking sense. But in “to be, or not to be” where it’s just “to exist, or not to exist,” that is, technically speaking, not quite a copula because it isn’t doing that linking thing. However – this is a very large “however” – because there are quite a few languages – not every language – where the copula in the linking sense and the copula in the existing sense are expressed with the same word, you do sometimes get people using the word “copula” to refer to, maybe, anything that “is” and “was” and “be” can do because it already has this handy word, therefore, is technically speaking one of its functions.
Lauren: A good way to check whether it’s the exist function is you can replace it with “I think, therefore I exist,” but we can’t replace “Lingthusiasm exists a podcast.”
Gretchen: “France exists bacon.” It’s not working for me.
Lauren: We can see how the copula has a broader set of functions. This is just one particular function in English but a good reminder as well that there is a lot of variation in what copulas can do across languages.
Gretchen: In this particular case, “I think, therefore I am,” which is “Cogito ergo sum” in Latin, that is also using “sum,” which is part of the copula verb “to be” in Latin. You can see how, okay, if you learn that “sum” is part of the copula in Latin, you might start saying, “Oh, any of this use of ‘am’ or ‘be’ is copulative,” which is sometimes used in this less specific way.
Lauren: Another language where the copula is highly irregular. As someone who is trying to learn that paradigm at the moment, I appreciate the benefit of being a native speaker of a language with a highly irregular copula set rather than having to learn it as an adult.
Gretchen: You don’t remember having learned all of the irregular copula forms. There’re also some cool things that copula constructions do differently across languages – or similarly even in languages that aren’t necessarily super related to each other. One cool thing you can do with copulas is you can have several of them.
Lauren: Excellent.
Gretchen: Yeah, more copulas are more fun. You can use them, for example, to distinguish between temporary and ongoing states. I think the example that people may have encountered about this is the Spanish “ser” versus “estar,” where “ser” is used for ongoing states and “estar” is used for things that are considered more temporary. You could have something like, “Estoy en la Casa,” “I’m in the house,” which is a temporary state, so I’m using the temporary copula, and “Soy lingüista,” which is a permanent state – thank you – which means, “I’m a linguist.”
Lauren: Absolutely. Once a linguist, always a linguist.
Gretchen: It’s used for professions even if, you know, you’re a teacher now, you might still use “ser” for that, even if you change careers in ten years. It’s the idea of is this relatively permanent or not permanent. The thing that really delighted me about learning these different verbs is that you can actually use them to distinguish between things that, in English, you would do with the adjective instead. “Estoy aburrida,” “I’m bored” –
Lauren: Because that’s a temporary state, yeah.
Gretchen: Hopefully. But “Soy aburrida,” which is the same word that I used for “bored,” is “I’m boring,” which is an ongoing state.
Lauren: That’s so much more permanent and intrinsic, right. Okay.
Gretchen: The interesting thing is that Spanish and Portuguese are fairly well known for having differences between “ser” and “estar,” but also Gaelic. I think several of the other Celtic languages – although Scottish Gaelic is the one that I know – also has a distinction that’s very much like “ser” and “estar” between temporary and ongoing states. You can have something like, “Tha mi gu math,” where the /ha/, which is spelled T-H-A, is the temporary version of the copula, so, “I am well,” versus “Is mise Gretchen,” where the /ɪs/, which sounds very different from /ha/, is the verb meaning, “I am Gretchen/My name is/Myself is Gretchen.”
Lauren: Not a temporary state.
Gretchen: Not a temporary state. Even if you change your name, the idea is that names are things that are a little bit more ongoing than wellness, perhaps. Interestingly, you also have this distinction showing up in completely unrelated languages. Chichewa is a Bantu language which is spoken mainly in Malawi and has a permanent versus temporary distinction but only in the present. You can do very similar examples. The permanent example – and hopefully this is a somewhat accurate pronunciation of the Chichewa – “Ine ndine mphunzitsi,” “I am a teacher,” which is, like being a linguist, an ongoing state even if you retire eventually. Whereas for temporary states, “Iyé ali bwino,” “He is well,” which is the same thing with the Gaelic “I am well.” This is a thing that maybe today you’re well, tomorrow you’re not well. Knowing about a distinction like this means that you can spot it in a variety of languages.
Lauren: And a really good reminder that because copulas appear in so many languages, you can find similar functions across languages from completely different families and in completely different parts of the world because there are thousands of human language experiments with what copulas do happening all around us. When I was learning Nepali, one thing I had to learn to pay attention to in the copulas in Nepali was that they have different levels of politeness depending on the way that you want to convey yourself when communicating with people. There’s a distinction between a common form, which can be impolite in some contexts; a middle politeness form, which is a place I hang out a lot; and then a very polite form. If I were to talk about someone I didn’t know very well, I would say, “Australian ho,” “They are Australian”; for middle politeness, “Australian hun,” “They are Australian”; then if I was being polite, I would say, “Australian hunuhuncha,” which is really just a very satisfying word to say. It’s great that being polite is so satisfying in terms of the sound as well as the social status. It’s something that happens across the whole verb paradigm, but you just use copulas so much in daily speaking, and it’s not something I ever had to think about when using a copula in English.
Gretchen: I feel like this is also one of the ways that identify whether or not someone’s speaking Japanese. Japanese has these two forms of the copula – “da,” which is informal, and “desu,” which is polite. If you hear people ending their sentences with “desu” – because the verb comes at the end in Japanese – you’re like, “Oh, they’re definitely speaking Japanese.” I don’t know what they’re saying. I don’t actually speak Japanese. But I can identify it because you hear, in certain contexts, a lot of these polite copula forms that just keep going through. It’s just another place for grammatical stuff to show up. If you have a language that has a grammatical thing going on, the copula would be one place where it happens.
Lauren: For example, in Yolmo and Syuba, as we talked about in our episode on evidentiality, this is where in the grammar the evidentials hang out. If you wanna talk about something that you know from ongoing experience or because you have some kind of visual or smell or sound evidence, you would use a different form of the copula and, a bit like the English copula, has some different functions. This can be pulled into other structures where it’s not really being used as a copula, it’s just coming along for its evidential function.
Gretchen: We’ve been talking a lot about, okay, this language has this word for the copula, this language has many words for the copula, but it’s also worth pointing out that sometimes you can have languages do copula functions using constructions that are not actually really traceable to being a copula itself. You can make it do something else. One example of this is from David Bowles on Twitter who tweets a lot about Nahuatl, which is a language that I first used to pronounce /nawatl̩/, but I have since learned to pronounce /nawatɬ/, and is spoken in South America. He says that instead of dropping the copula or using a particular word that’s a copula, they treat the noun or the adjective that you want to link with something as a verb by adding a subject prefix to it.
Lauren: Cool.
Gretchen: If you wanna say something – like “beautiful” is “cualtzin.” Hopefully I’m pronouncing that somewhere near accuracy. But if you wanna say, “You are beautiful,” you would say, “ticualtzin,” where the ti- is a subject prefix meaning “you.” You’re essentially making “beautiful” into a verb, you know, “I beautiful,” “You beautiful,” “He or she beautifuls.” Rather than putting a separate word in to link it, you’re just treating it like you would any other verb in the language.
Lauren: That’s a really great example of how a copula function can be more than just looking for a copula verb in a language.
Gretchen: Which is another reason why it’s useful to have a word-like copula to say, ah, here’s this function that we can trace through the different strategies that languages use to accomplish it, some of which correspond to particular verbs, and some of which don’t.
Lauren: I know Auslan doesn’t have a specific copula either, which is not to say it doesn’t have a copula function. To do a copula, you have the subject, and then you have the other thing that you’re linking it with, whether it’s a location or an attribute. Word order is very important for establishing a copula relationship. If I wanted to say something like, “Lingthusiasm is a podcast,” I would sign, “Lingthusiasm,” and then I would sign, “podcast.” There are some secondary channels that you can use. Things like your facial expression, you would generally use some raised eyebrows to indicate for the first half that this the topic and then the other bit is what you’re linking to it. It’s not that it doesn’t have a copula function, it’s just that you’re not looking for a particular single sign that has that function.
Gretchen: And it’s not that you’re just doing these two signs sequentially with nothing indicating that there’s any relationship to them because there are the non-manual signs that are on your face and stuff that are indicating, yeah, there’s a relationship here that I’m talking about them in juxtaposition with each other.
Lauren: Yeah. And I think ASL does something similar. I don’t know if it’s more common in signed languages because they have this spatial resource to make use of to not need a particular word for the copula function. There might be other signed languages that do have a specific signed copula. I’m sure that for something like Signed English, which is a more literal sign equivalent of English, that there probably is one because you’re trying to sign all the English words. But for Auslan, there’s no specific copula sign.
Gretchen: Nice. This gets us into something that sometimes comes up when you’re talking about copulas which is languages that sometimes put the copula and sometimes don’t, which is different from the situation in Nahuatl or in Auslan where you do a different type of construction that is not traceable as a single word to being a copula. But in Arabic, for example – when I was learning Arabic, I studied a bunch of languages before. I was like, yeah, okay, I know that one of the words that’s really useful to learn early on is like, “be” and “am” and “is.” Sometimes there’s some irregularity, but they’re pretty common. I should try to learn these. The textbook and my instructor was like, yeah, no. In Arabic, in the present tense, and if there isn’t a negation going on, there just isn’t a word for the copula.
Lauren: Of course, it’s worth being very clear that the fact that there is no word is what makes it meaningful – that it’s a zero copula.
Gretchen: Right. It’s a zero copula. There isn’t a word. If you wanna say something like, “The book is big,” you could say, “alkitab kabir,” which is literally, “the book big,” but you distinguish it from, “the big book,” which would be “alkitab alkabir,” which is literally, “the book the big.” That “the” is linking it and saying, okay, these are both part of the same noun phrase, whereas, because you didn’t have the “the,” okay, there’s an understood copula there. But it’s null, and it’s not something you literally say. However, if you wanna say, “The book is not big,” or “The book was big,” or something like that, then you need to add another verb, “kāna” or “laysa,” to indicate the negation or the past tense. There is a copula elsewhere in the language, but in the simplest case of the copula, which is just linking two things in that default, present, no negation going on, no funny business, you juxtaposing the words by itself is enough, and it is, in fact, the only thing that you do.
Lauren: The World Atlas of Linguistic Structures has a survey of how common it is to be able to do this zero copula without having a specific copula word there. It’s relatively small by WALS standards – there’s, like, 400 languages. In the survey, it’s possible to do this zero copula thing like Arabic in about 45% of the languages they surveyed. It’s by no means uncommon if you’re learning a language and you encounter a zero copula. It does happen in quite a broad range of languages. It’s not just like it’s a common thing in one particular language family. In fact, Russian is known for having a zero copula in the present tense, which I find really interesting as a Polish speaker, which does have a present copula in that form. So, closely related languages can do different things just as we saw similar things happening across very different and non-related languages. The thing I find really interesting about the Russian one is that, apparently, there was a present tense copula all the way up until the 19th Century. If you read something like Dostoevsky, you’ll see this form. But because it’s in something like Dostoevsky, now, if people use it, it has this archaic effect when you speak or use it in writing.
Gretchen: Sort of like using something from Shakespeare like, “thou art,” because we’re familiar with this from literature, but it’s not something that’s right there.
Lauren: Yes, unfortunately we’ve lost “art” from our paradigm just as the Russians have lost their present tense copula. Some languages will have a zero or potentially some stylistic effect from choosing to include it or not.
Gretchen: This is a great segue into talking about the zero copula in African American English, which is also an example of this very close contact linguistic variation with Russian and Polish where my variety of English, sort of mainstream North American English, requires a copula in the present tense most of the time – I’m gonna put an asterisk on this because there’s a few contexts where I don’t have to do it – but in African American English, you can have a sentence like, “Some of them big, and some of them small,” which means, “Some of them are big, and some of them are small.” But interestingly, there’s a lot of constraints on this as well. Again, it’s only in the present tense. It’s not with negation. And you can’t do it with “am.”
Lauren: Interesting. So, a real consistent grammatical structure to how these copulas get used.
Gretchen: Right, which is interestingly similar to how you can’t do “am not,” “amn’t,” with “am.” There’s some weird stuff going on with English “am.”
Lauren: Something about first person that makes everyone very sensitive to their copula use.
Gretchen: It’s interesting. There’s rules around this. When people do terrible parodies of African American English, they often aren’t paying attention to the specific constraints on the rules for when you can and can’t do this.
Lauren: Now, I need to know what contexts you find it’s possible to not use a copula.
Gretchen: I didn’t think I had any examples of null copula, but when we were looking up information about this, I realised there’s also a construction in English where you can say something like, “The more the merrier.”
Lauren: A classic quote, right there.
Gretchen: Classic quote. That is a null copula, my friends.
Lauren: Is it just because of how ubiquitous that saying is?
Gretchen: I don’t know. There’s a few fixed phrases like, “The more the merrier,” “The more the better,” that are classic quotes. I don’t know if I can do like, “The more the hungrier.” Can I put other stuff in that context?
Lauren: “The later the sleepier”?
Gretchen: Yeah, I dunno. It kinda works. It’s in that comparative construction where it seems to work. Also, there is a news headline null copula in English.
Lauren: Oh my gosh, there is, too.
Gretchen: I went and got a few examples of this, unfortunately not from classic quotes because there aren’t really classic quotes that are news headlines also.
Lauren: Oh gosh, you got them from news headlines. Am I gonna be able to cope with this?
Gretchen: I got them from news headlines from The Onion.
Lauren: Okay, thank you.
Gretchen: For comic value. A few of these are, “Area Woman Not Yelling at You, She’s Just Saying.”
Lauren: I like that one because they’ve snuck one into the second half, “She’s just saying.” But in any other context I would have to say, “Area woman is not yelling at you.”
Gretchen: Exactly. “Neighbour Oblivious to Fact He Being Groomed for Cat Sitting.”
Lauren: Okay. That one broke my brain. So, “The neighbour is oblivious to the fact he is being groomed for cat sitting.”
Gretchen: Right. “Neighbour Oblivious” kind of works as a news headline null copula but “He Being Groomed,” I think it might be something about the “he” that’s really not quite working as a null copula for me there either.
Lauren: I think it’s also just something about the fact that it’s such a not news headline topic that makes it very hard for my brain to take it seriously.
Gretchen: I mean, this is something that comes up when you get headlines from The Onion, admittedly. “Friendship Moving Way Too Fast.”
Lauren: “Friendship is moving way too fast” would not sound like a headline in the way this does.
Gretchen: Finally, “Study: More Parents Opting for One Big Baby Over Multi-Child Households,” which has a very weird stock photo.
Lauren: That really does sound like a newspaper headline. I thought newspaper headlines mostly came about by removing “the” or “a,” but you’re right, removing the copula is what really makes them hit as newspaper-vibe. At the start of the episode, we talked about the linking function of copulas and this existence function that they have in English as well.
Gretchen: We can think of these as the “France is bacon” function and the “to be, or not to be” function, yes.
Lauren: These are by no means the only functions that the copula has in English. Because it’s this tiny, functional word, it gets picked up in a whole bunch of other uses as well. It’s worth just doing a brief tour of some of those.
Gretchen: The copula is also sometimes used something like, “I am eating the cake,” or “The cake was eaten” – that “am” and “was” are both forms of the verb “to be.” Sometimes, they get dragged in and said, oh, well, if we say anything that “to be” is part of the copula, sometimes it’ll get talked about as a copula even though technically what they’re doing is not quite the same type of linking. Although, an interesting complication that happens there is if you have a sentence like, “The shirt was torn,” is that referring to the same thing as “The shirt was green” – the adjective that I’m applying to the shirt is “torn”? Or am I saying the shirt was torn by the dog and then it’s a verb? You can see why in something like, “The shirt was torn,” “The cake was eaten,” you might wanna talk about a copula from a linking perspective even though it’s not necessarily gonna be a function that’s expressed by a copula in a different language that might actually have a different way of expressing a passive.
Lauren: Then on top of all of this, we have other words like, “become,” which in some contexts have a copula-like function – so something like, “I became hungry,” appears to have this linking of two attributes that has a real copula vibe to it.
Gretchen: If you have something like “feel” in “It feels hot,” or “seem,” “Good company makes a trip seem shorter,” if we want to have a quote-y feel. You can sometimes use “be” in place of them, you know, “It is hot,” “I am tired,” “makes a trip become shorter,” or “be shorter.” There’s words you can use in some contexts as a synonym for “be” that also provide that kind of link.
Lauren: We have a term for these. They’re called “pseudo-copulas” because they’re kinda doing a copula thing but not always and not with that specific set of functions that copula verbs have – but worth keeping an eye out for them, anyway.
Gretchen: When I think about copulas, I also remember a game that I used to play with some friends in high school. One of my friends had discovered this proposal for a philosophical language form called “E-Prime.” This was a form of English – which is the “E” – which doesn’t use any of the forms of the verb “to be.”
Lauren: Okay. Having now spent a good half an hour chatting about the forms of this verb, this feels like quite a mental exercise.
Gretchen: Right. There’s some level of philosophical justification of like, maybe this will make your thoughts clearer because if you say, “The sky is blue,” what you really mean is, “The sky appears blue to me,” and so you should basically be using pseudo-copulas, as we just talked about, instead of a proper copula because how do you know the sky is really blue, and shouldn’t you be watching what you assert.
Lauren: It’s really forcing you to make use of those pseudo-copulas because they fit into a lot of those constructions very nicely.
Gretchen: I think maybe there’s an interesting point to be made about being very precise in terms of what you can state as true. Also, one of the things that we realised over the course of a few different lunch breaks playing this game of what-if-we-didn’t-use-the-verb-to-be is that there’s all these other forms “to be” has that are probably not really required to be omitted in order for greater intellectual precision and clarity of thought as the grandiose claims go. If you say something like, “I am eating,” are you really being less precise than, “I eat”?
Lauren: I imagine it helps you focus your thinking by basically completely freezing you up sentence to sentence because you have to think about all these different functions. A function word is something we tend to take for granted in our vocabulary.
Gretchen: Right, exactly. It’s kind of like – I subsequently played an improv game where you can’t use any words with the letter S in it just to mess with you. I think it works better as a game of just-to-mess-with-you of what-if-you-thought-about-your-linguistic-forms-a-lot and tried to play this kind of Gotcha! game than actually – I don’t think it gave us any additional philosophical clarity while we were playing it.
Lauren: If you’re writing some sci-fi at the moment, it would be really fun to have the aliens make it through the whole book using no copulas in English translation. They have to speak E-Prime.
Gretchen: That would be interesting! You do sometimes get people writing books without the letter E or something, so I think you could do it as a written exercise in a way that’s a lot harder to do in real time.
Lauren: This was a delightfully philosophical ending to our discussion about copulas. Since we started with inspirational quotes, should we maybe finish with some inspirational quotes and change some to be able copulas?
Gretchen: I absolutely think we should change some philosophical quotes to be about copulas. I wanna say that “Life is like a box of copulas.”
Lauren: Very profound. “You must be the copula you wish to see in the world.”
[Music]
Gretchen: For more Lingthusiasm and links to all the things mentioned in this episode, go to lingthusiasm.com. You can listen to us on Apple Podcast, Google Podcast, Spotify, SoundCloud, YouTube, or wherever else you get your podcasts. You can follow @lingthusiasm on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr. You can get IPA scarves, “Not Judging Your Grammar, Just Analysing It” t-shirts, and other Lingthusiasm merch at lingthusiasm.com/merch. I can be found as @GretchenAMcC on Twitter, my blog is AllThingsLinguistic.com, and my book about internet language is called Because Internet.
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Gretchen: Lingthusiasm is created and produced by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our Senior Producer is Claire Gawne, our Editorial Producer is Sarah Dopierala, our Production Manager is Liz McCullough, and our music is “Ancient City” by The Triangles.
Lauren: Stay lingthusiastic!
[Music]
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The main copula in English—"to be"—was lost in Trigedasleng's development. A copula essentially is a word that links the subject to a statement about it. For example, in the sentence "The cat is black", the copula "is" connects "cat" with "black".
Unlike English, Trigedasleng has two main copulas, ste and laik, which have a slight distinction in usage. Laik can only be used to connect the subject with a noun. For example:
Ai laik Okteivia. "I am Octavia."
Em laik gona. "He is a warrior."
Ste may only connect the subject to an adjective:
Gona ste biga. "The warrior is large."
Emo ste klir. "They are safe."
Vocab List
adjectival copula — ste (from "stay")
nominal copula — laik (from the frequent use of "like" in our everyday speech)
big — biga (from "big")
boy — skat (unknown)
girl — gada (unknown)
hungry — enti (from "empty")
little — strik (unknown)
safe — klir (from "clear")
teacher — ticha (from "teacher")
they — emo (from "them all")
Exercises
All translations are English to Trigedasleng because the main point of this lesson is knowing whether ste or laik should be used. Please keep in mind that I will use vocabulary from previous lessons in exercises.
1. I am a warrior.
2. She is Lexa.
3. The teacher is safe.
4. The girl is the commander.
5. The boy is little.
6. They are hungry.
7. It is big.
8. Nyko is a healer.
9. Monty is safe.
10. The warrior is a boy.
As always, feel free to message us if you spot an error or have any questions!
Hello! Recently in my writing, I've noticed that I tend to chose a word and overuse it for a while before moving on to another. The problem is, the words I chose are ones I find very hard to replace (Was, had, before). Do you have any advice on replacing these words and others like them? Is there anything you can suggest to help break the habit of overusing certain words?
The words you listed are commonly used for transitional and connecting reasons, and yeah, there aren’t many tricks for replacing them other than rewording your sentence. However, since they’re so common you don’t really need to worry excessively about people accusing you of a limited vocabulary or something. They’re the kind of words people skip over, so it may not add to your writing but it doesn’t super take away from it, either.
Verbs, first:
Words like “was” are one form of the copula that many writers consider weak phrasing. Strong verbs can do a lot for your writing, so always sticking to “is,” “was,” and “am” (like I am tired, she was hungry) etc, can get boring. They’re common words so it’s not like you have to cut every usage of it. But you can mix it up. While technically verbs like seem, look, and feel are copulas as well, they’re better than the verb “to be,” at least. You can rephrase to “I feel tired” or “she seems hungry” depending on what other verbs would work and still fit your intended meaning.
Still, they’re not the best verbs you can use. A passive voice (the house was burning) just tends to be less exciting than an active voice (the house burned). Of course, there are times for passive—especially when a character is trying to shift blame.
Transitional words:
There are a lot of words used to transition time like before, after, during, etc. And yeah, they don’t usually have direct replacements. You honestly shouldn’t worry too much. Read it out loud, and if it sounds strange then try rewording your sentences. But, really, don’t overthink it. Read this:
“You kill the spirits. You kill them all, before they cause any damage. They’ve just woken up, and most are still sluggish. Some will bide their time before making a move. When they do, you’ll have to be ready.”
Maybe it’s just me, but those few sentences don’t raise any flags for me. Even though there were two uses of “before” only a sentence apart from each other. As long as you’re not being really repetitious about it (like starting three sentences in a row with “After that, I…”), it’s not a problem. Often these words are “invisible” so to speak, like how people say the “said” tag for dialogue is. It’s read and acknowledged, but kinda glossed over.
Here’s another article about how to rephrase for some of those common words, and honestly I think they were able to sum things up better than I did:
Perhaps you’ve all heard of the dreaded copula, and how they destroy your writing. Sometimes this is the case, but not always. It’s simply the idea that a verb like “is” or “was” isn’t very strong. You can still use them, but if you can rearrange the sentence in some way to cut it, then go for it. With exceptions.
Passive voice: The house was burning.
Active voice: George burned down the house.
The active voice is active because someone is doing something. George burned the house. It’s more specific. Passive, on the other hand, is vague. The house is burning, but who started it? What’s going on here? There are times when you want the situation to be vague. If your characters are lying, for example, or if they honestly don’t know what happened. Still, one character might be more accusatory (Someone lit a fire!) while another character might be hesitant to assign a “doer” (There must have been an accident). Your usage should change depending on the event and the speaker.
If you don’t want to be vague, cut the copulas. Go straight to it. It’ll also make your sentences less wordy. The fewer words you have, the more each one means.
Passive: The tree was struck by lightning.
Active: Lightning struck the tree.
98% of the time, the active voice will be better. It’s more specific, it’s less wordy. The exception would be when the action is interrupted.
As she was handed the gun, the window shattered.
George was burning down the house. (implied when we found him as the interruption)
Passive voice can exist anywhere, and it’s not always bad—sometimes, it can get across a specific point. Still, pay attention to when you use it and make sure you really need it there.
I’d also like to clarify that a past tense narration does not mean passive, and a present tense narration does not mean active. Passiveness is a lack of activity, not a lack of immediacy.
Passive in past tense: The boy was bitten by the dog.
Passive in present tense: The boy is bit by the dog.
Active in past tense: The dog bit the boy.
Active in present tense: The dog bites the boy.
Present tense gives a sense of immediacy, so you might think it’s active simply because it’s happening NOW, but that’s not necessarily the case. People can passively fail to act in real time. Just because a story happened in the past does not mean the characters in the story were passive. Their actions happened in the past, but at the time they were actively acting.
My birthday is literally 5 days away and I don't even know what I want for it, other than Watch Dogs. My proposal still stands tho, if someone can pre-order it for me for my birthday I would be bounded to date you no matter what. Plz soMEONE HELP I WOULD BE IN YOUR DEBT.
