Copula in Standard English and its Counterpart in Standard Arabic

Abstract

Languages are different in their structures . Each language is a unique system of communication with its own sounds and morphemes . So , each language is self- contained within its own structure .The words in any language are arranged in certain patterns to produce grammatical structures .
The sentence consists of the subject and the predicate . Some languages must contain a verb in their structures like English , others may contain a verb in their structures and may not like Arabic . Accordingly , it can be said that English sentence is a verbal one begins with the subject, whereas Arabic sentence is either verbal or nominal . Some grammarians give the name equational to the sentence which does not contain a verb .
Some verbs have little independent meaning and their function is to link the subject with the complement so they are called copular verbs as verb be in English, est in French, ist in German , bûn in Kurdish , and  in Greek . Other languages do not have copular verbs in the nominal sentence corresponding to the verbs mentioned above so they are called by some orientalists and grammarians non-copulative languages as Arabic, Russian and Hungarian. Since that this research is concerned with Arabic , so it is to be mentioned that the term non- copulative is not suitable for Arabic because it has a copula of a different kind depending on the tenses and context