English

Noun

copula ‎(plural copulas or copulae)

1. (linguistics, grammar) A word, usually a verb, used to link the subject of a sentence with a predicate (usually a subject complement or an adverbial), that unites or associates the subject with the predicate.
   • 1994, Randall Hendrick, 8: The Brythonic Celtic copula and head raising, David Lightfoot, Norbert Hornstein (editors), Verb Movement, page 163,

     I begin by arguing in section 2 that there are in fact at least two Celtic copulas, a grammatical copula that simply spells out tense and agreement, and a substantive copula formed on a lexically listed verbal stem.

   • 2002, Quentin Smith, Language and Time, page 189,

     The theory of conjunctively tensed copulae will be developed and stated with more precision in the following section.

   • 2003, Giuliano Bernini, The copula in learner Italian: Finiteness and verbal inflection, Christine Dimroth, Marianne Starren (editors), Information Structure and the Dynamics of Language Acquisition, page 159,

     This paper explores the position of the copula in the development of the verb system in second language acquisition of Italian.

   • 2006, Christine Czinglar, Antigone Katiĉić, Katharina Köhler, Chris Schaner-Wolles, Strategies in the L1-Acquisition of Predication: The Copula Construction in German and Croatian, Natalia Gagarina, Insa Gülzow (editors), page 95,

     The present study focuses on the acquisition of a specific verbal element, namely the copula, in predicative constructions in a cross-linguistic perspective (English, German, Croatian).

2. (statistics) A function that represents the association between two or more variables, independent of the individual marginal distributions of the variables.
   • 2009 March 10, Dennis Overbye, “Mathematical Model and the Mortgage Mess”, in New York Times:

     In 2000, David X. Li, a banker with a doctorate in statistics who was then at RiskMetrics, part of J. P. Morgan Chase, began using mathematical functions called Gaussian copulas to estimate the likelihood of corporations’ dying in unison.

   • 2009, N. Balakrishnan, Chin-Diew Lai, Continuous Bivariate Distributions, page 59,

     There is little statistical theoretical theory for copulas. Sensitivity studies of estimation procedures and goodness-of-fit tests for copulas are unknown.

   • 2011, Julian Shaw, Chapter 16: Julian Shaw, Richard R. Lindsey, Barry Schachter (editors), How I Became a Quant: Insights from 25 of Wall Street's Elite, page 240,

     Copulas provide an example of the haphazard evolution of quantitative finance. The key result is Sklar's theorem, which says that one can characterize any multivariate probability distribution by its copula (which specifies the correlation structure) and its marginal distributions (the conditional one dimensional distributions). Thus one can create multivariate distributions by mixing and matching copulas and marginal distributions.

   • 2011, Ostap Okhrin, Chapter 17: Fitting High-Dimensional Copulae to Data, Jin-Chuan Duan, Wolfgang Karl Härdle, James E. Gentle (editors), Handbook of Computational Finance, page 482,

     A recently developed flexible method is provided by hierarchical Archimedean copulae (HAC).

3. (music) A device that connects two or more keyboards of an organ.
4. (biology) The act of copulation; mating.

Synonyms

• (grammar): linking verb, copular, copular verb

Derived terms

• copular
• double copula
• pseudocopula
• semicopula
• zero copula

Related terms

Translations

References

• copula in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, G. & C. Merriam, 1913
• copula in The Century Dictionary, The Century Co., New York, 1911

See also

• Appendix:List of English copulae
• Copula (linguistics) on Wikipedia.Wikipedia
• Copula (probability theory) on Wikipedia.Wikipedia
• Copula (music) on Wikipedia.Wikipedia

Anagrams

• coupla, cupola, pocula

French

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /kɔ.py.la/
• Homophones: copulas, copulât

Verb

copula

1. third-person singular past historic of copuler

Italian

Etymology

Borrowed from Latin copula. Cognate to Italian coppia, from the same source, but inherited.

Noun

copula f ‎(plural copule)

1. copula
2. conjunction

Verb

copula

1. third-person singular present indicative of copulare
2. second-person singular imperative of copulare

Anagrams

• cupola

Latin

Etymology

Contraction of *co-apula, from co ‎(“together”) + apere ‎(“to join”), apō ‎(“I join”).

Pronunciation

• (Classical) IPA^(key): /ˈkoː.pu.la/, [ˈkoː.pʊ.ɫa]

Noun

cōpula f ‎(genitive cōpulae); first declension

1. A bond, tie, or other connecting item.

Inflection

First declension.

Derived terms

• cōpulō

Descendants

References

• copula in Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short (1879) A Latin Dictionary, Oxford: Clarendon Press
• copula in Charlton T. Lewis (1891) An Elementary Latin Dictionary, New York: Harper & Brothers
• COPULA in Charles du Fresne du Cange’s Glossarium Mediæ et Infimæ Latinitatis (augmented edition, 1883–1887)

Portuguese

Verb

copula

1. third-person singular (ele and ela, also used with você and others) present indicative of copular
2. second-person singular (tu, sometimes used with você) affirmative imperative of copular

Spanish

Verb

copula

1. Informal second-person singular (tú) affirmative imperative form of copular.
2. Formal second-person singular (usted) present indicative form of copular.
3. Third-person singular (él, ella, also used with usted^?) present indicative form of copular.