Zerocopula

Zerocopula, or zero copula, is a linguistic phenomenon in which the copular verb to be is omitted in sentences where it would appear in the standard form. It most often concerns present-tense equative or predicative clauses, where a subject is linked to a predicative adjective or noun phrase without an explicit be-verb. The occurrence can be obligatory in some languages, optional in others, or restricted to particular dialects, registers, or contexts.

The phenomenon is documented in a variety of languages and language groups. In several Slavic languages, such as Russian, the present-tense copula is typically omitted in equative constructions (for example, Он учитель = He is a teacher). In other languages, including many dialects of English, the be-verb may be deleted in informal speech or in specific syntactic environments, yielding sentences like The car old or She hungry. Zerocopula can also appear in certain Arabic dialects and other language varieties, where the absence of a copula in predicative clauses is a normal or register-limited feature. In some contexts, the copula may be optional or context-dependent, with its inclusion signaling emphasis, formality, or a contrastive focus.

In linguistic analysis, zerocopula is viewed as a variation in the marking of predication and the syntactic realization of the copular verb. It bears on typology, sociolinguistics, and language teaching, illustrating how languages differ in how they encode identity, state, or classification in predicative clauses. While widely attested, the status and rules governing zerocopula differ across languages and dialects and are often sensitive to discourse context and stylistic choice.