Re: Poijpohloneny

Hi!

Jeff Jones <jeffsjones@...> writes:
...
> >Hm... I'm not quite sure what a copula is, but I think from what I've
> >read "to be" in English is the copula, but not in all circumstances,
> >such as in the sentence, "The book is on the table."
>
> Pretty much so, as I understand it. Maybe "The book is new" or "This is a
> new book" might be more central to the idea
Hmm, a copula takes something that may be used as a predicate and
makes a syntactical predicate from it.  E.g. 'new' may be used as a
predicate, i.e., to express that something *is* new.  To use 'new' as
a verb, you need the copula 'to be'.  'Book new' is ungrammatical in
English.  That's the only reason you have to use 'to be'.  Other
languages work differently (Chinese: 'shu1 xin1.' (but maybe that's
pragmatically too short for Chinese, I don't know)).

You can use 'to be' as a full verb, too:

- I think, therefore I am.

In all of the above sentences:

   'The book is on the table.'
   'The book is new.'
   'This is a new book.'

I would analyse 'is' as the copula.  It it was not in the first
sentence, then that sentence would be highly mystical to me:
'That book does its being on the table!' :-)

**Henrik

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