Editing Zero copula (section)

{{Short description|Lacking or omission of a "to be" verb, common in some languages and stylistic in others}}{{More citations needed|date=January 2008}}
'''Zero copula''', also known as '''null copula''', is a linguistic phenomenon whereby the subject is joined to the predicate without overt marking of this relationship (like the [[copula (linguistics)|copula]] ''to be'' in English). One can distinguish languages that simply do not have a copula and languages that have a copula that is optional in certain contexts.

Many languages exhibit this in some contexts, including [[Assamese language|Assamese]], [[Bengali language|Bengali]], [[Kannada]], [[Malay language|Malay]]/[[Indonesian language|Indonesian]], [[Filipino language|Filipino]]/[[Tagalog language|Tagalog]], [[Turkish language|Turkish]], [[Tamil language|Tamil]], [[Telugu language|Telugu]], [[Malayalam language|Malayalam]], [[Hindi]], [[Guarani language|Guarani]], [[Kazakh language|Kazakh]], [[Turkmen language|Turkmen]], [[Varieties of Chinese|Chinese]], [[Japanese language|Japanese]], [[Ukrainian language|Ukrainian]], [[Russian language|Russian]], [[Belarusian language|Belarusian]], [[Tatar language|Tatar]], [[Azerbaijani language|Azerbaijani]], [[Swahili language|Swahili]], [[Hungarian language|Hungarian]], [[Hebrew language|Hebrew]], [[Arabic language|Arabic]], [[Berber languages|Berber]],<ref>{{cite book |title= Linguistique berbère: études de syntaxe et de diachronie|last= Chaker|first= Salem|publisher= Peeters Publishers|year= 1995|isbn= 2-87723-152-6|pages= 13}}</ref> [[Luganda|Ganda]], [[Hawaiian language|Hawaiian]], [[Sinhalese language|Sinhala]], [[Irish language|Irish]], [[Welsh language|Welsh]], [[Nahuatl language|Nahuatl]], [[Māori language|Māori]], [[Mongolian language|Mongolian]], [[Greenlandic language|Greenlandic]], [[Lithuanian language|Lithuanian]], [[Latvian language|Latvian]], [[Polish language|Polish]]{{Citation needed|date=November 2024}}, [[Slovakian language|Slovak]], [[Quechua language|Quechua]], and [[American Sign Language]].

Dropping the copula is also found, to a lesser extent, in [[English language|English]] and many other languages, used most frequently in [[rhetoric]], casual speech, non-standard varieties, and [[headlinese]], the writing style used in newspaper [[headline]]s. Sometimes, these omissions cause unintended [[syntactic ambiguity#In headlines|syntactic ambiguity]].