The Turkish copula is one of the more distinct features of

Turkish grammar Turkish grammar ( tr, Türkçe dil bilgisi), as described in this article, is the grammar of standard Turkish as spoken and written by educated people in the Republic of Turkey. Turkish is a highly agglutinative language, in that much of the gramm ...

. In

Turkish Turkish may refer to: *a Turkic language spoken by the Turks * of or about Turkey ** Turkish language *** Turkish alphabet ** Turkish people, a Turkic ethnic group and nation *** Turkish citizen, a citizen of Turkey *** Turkish communities and mi ...

, copulas are called ''ek-eylem'' () or ''ek-fiil'' () ('

suffix In linguistics, a suffix is an affix which is placed after the stem of a word. Common examples are case endings, which indicate the grammatical case of nouns, adjectives, and verb endings, which form the conjugation of verbs. Suffixes can carry ...

verb A verb () is a word (part of speech) that in syntax generally conveys an action (''bring'', ''read'', ''walk'', ''run'', ''learn''), an occurrence (''happen'', ''become''), or a state of being (''be'', ''exist'', ''stand''). In the usual descri ...

'). Turkish is a highly

agglutinative language An agglutinative language is a type of synthetic language with morphology that primarily uses agglutination. Words may contain different morphemes to determine their meanings, but all of these morphemes (including stems and affixes) tend to remain ...

and copulas are rendered as

es, albeit with a few exceptions.

Zero copula

Zero copula Zero copula is a linguistic phenomenon whereby the subject is joined to the predicate without overt marking of this relationship (like the copula "to be" in English). One can distinguish languages that simply do not have a copula and languages tha ...

is the rule for

third person Third person, or third-person, may refer to: * Third person (grammar), a point of view (in English, ''he'', ''she'', ''it'', and ''they'') ** Illeism, the act of referring to oneself in the third person * Third-person narrative, a perspective in p ...

, as in Hungarian and Russian. That means two nouns, or a noun and an adjective can be juxtaposed to make a sentence without using any copula. Third-person plural might be indicated with the use of plural suffix ''-lar/-ler''. :

To be (''olmak'' versus ''imek'')

Turkish "to be" as regular/ auxiliary verb ( olmak) and "to be" as copula (imek) contrasts. The auxiliary verb ''imek'' (''i-'' is the

root In vascular plants, the roots are the organs of a plant that are modified to provide anchorage for the plant and take in water and nutrients into the plant body, which allows plants to grow taller and faster. They are most often below the sur ...

) shows its existence only through suffixes to

predicate Predicate or predication may refer to: * Predicate (grammar), in linguistics * Predication (philosophy) * several closely related uses in mathematics and formal logic: **Predicate (mathematical logic) **Propositional function **Finitary relation, o ...

s that can be

noun A noun () is a word that generally functions as the name of a specific object or set of objects, such as living creatures, places, actions, qualities, states of existence, or ideas.Example nouns for: * Living creatures (including people, alive, d ...

adjective In linguistics, an adjective (list of glossing abbreviations, abbreviated ) is a word that generally grammatical modifier, modifies a noun or noun phrase or describes its referent. Its semantic role is to change information given by the noun. Tra ...

s or arguably conjugated verb stems, arguably being the only

irregular verb A regular verb is any verb whose conjugation follows the typical pattern, or one of the typical patterns, of the language to which it belongs. A verb whose conjugation follows a different pattern is called an irregular verb. This is one instance ...

in Turkish. The missing forms of ''i-'' are supplied by ''ol-'': the

infinitive Infinitive (abbreviated ) is a linguistics term for certain verb forms existing in many languages, most often used as non-finite verbs. As with many linguistic concepts, there is not a single definition applicable to all languages. The word is deri ...

''olmak'' is an example, since there is no infinitive ''*imek''. An infinitive ''ermek'' appeared in ancient texts; its stem ''er-'' became the current ''i-''.G. L. Lewis, ''Turkish Grammar'', Oxford University Press, 1967; 2nd edition, 2000 The word ''idir'', a variation of ''imek'' indicates alethic modality, so is used for emphasis, or to prevent ambiguity. ''İdir'' is an

enclitic In morphology and syntax, a clitic (, backformed from Greek "leaning" or "enclitic"Crystal, David. ''A First Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics''. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1980. Print.) is a morpheme that has syntactic characteristics of a wo ...

word, and exhibits

vowel harmony In phonology, vowel harmony is an Assimilation (linguistics), assimilatory process in which the vowels of a given domain – typically a phonological word – have to be members of the same natural class (thus "in harmony"). Vowel harmony is t ...

when used as a suffix. Therefore ''Ali asker idir'' turns into ''Ali askerdir''. In examples, emphasised word is written bold: :

Negative copula

Negation is indicated by the negative copula ''değil''. ''Değil'' is never used as a suffix, but it takes suffixes according to context. :

Personal copulas

A complete sentence is formed by the addition of a suffix to a noun or adjective as an instance of

nonverbal person agreement In linguistics, conjugation () is the creation of derived forms of a verb from its principal parts by inflection (alteration of form according to rules of grammar). For instance, the verb ''break'' can be conjugated to form the words ''break'', ...

, with the conjugate verb "imek" only implied. These suffixes are, in origin, personal pronouns and indicate

grammatical person In linguistics, grammatical person is the grammatical distinction between deictic references to participant(s) in an event; typically the distinction is between the speaker ( first person), the addressee ( second person), and others (third pers ...

. :

Past copulas

Alethic past tense is indicated with ''idi'', another variation of ''imek''. It is enclitic and exhibits vowel harmony like ''idir''. : The inferential past tense is indicated with ''imiş''. It is enclitic and exhibits vowel harmony like ''idir''. :

Conditional copulas

Conditional Conditional (if then) may refer to: * Causal conditional, if X then Y, where X is a cause of Y * Conditional probability, the probability of an event A given that another event B has occurred *Conditional proof, in logic: a proof that asserts a ...

(hypothetical) mood is indicated with ''ise''. It is enclitic and exhibits vowel harmony like ''idir''. :

References

{{Turkish language Copula