COPULA

The term copula is used to refer to the main copulae in a language. In the case of English, this is the word /be/ and its conjugations: *was, were, am, is and are* which are not different kinds of verbs - in fact I reject the old description of copulae as *verbs* out of hand. Verbs are *doing* words - and copula do not DO anything at all, they merely point at words which do describe what the subject of a sentence does (i.e. those words which form the predicate of a sentence.) Such archaic grammatical classification has its origins in monkish medieval misunderstandings. All scholastic semanticists and gothic wordifiers of the middle ages were influenced by creation myths rife with the gerundial reification of unworldly ex nihilio transcendentalisms like /being/ and /existence/ and other useful religious fictions. Torture and the inquisitorial bonfire was the result for anyone that disagreed.

Copulae do have meaning though. Their semantic cargo is to indicate and confirm the numerical and temporal relations between the sentential subjectival and objectival concord as expressed in its predicative existential modality/modalities of number and time. The sentential function of an indicant copula is to confirm the utterer's neurological instantiaton (internal representation) of the subject and provide prefatory, validatory variables of number and time. Syntactically in English: the conjugates of the be-word: "was, were, am, is and are" are operators which normally precede a descriptive predicate pointing to the existential nature of an existent NOT to assert the fact that it exists.


In our SVO (subject-verb-object) language English the sentence structure is such that the subject comes first, the copula or verb second, and the object or predicate third. Thus we can have:

"Freddie Fernakerpan is eating ice cream" = "The nominatum (that which is nominated by the self instantiating noun Freddie Fernakerpan) presently exists in the modality of eating ice cream."

Therefore the little copula /is/ functions as a shortened, more convenient, anti-periphrastic form of saying:

*the self instantiating noun X presently exists in the modality of blah, blah, blah.*


NOMINATIVE INSTANTIATION
The utterance or sensorial awareness of ANY noun is automatically sufficient enough to neurologically instantiate it as a representative instance of such an entity. Experientially most people thinking of the words: "Freddie Fernakerpan" will cognise of a male person, known or unknown - living or dead. If in the unlikely event of a person owning a parrot called "Freddie Fernakerpan" it is quite possible that the word will be instantiated in the form of a brightly coloured zygodactyl tropical bird with a short hooked beak and the ability to mimic sounds. In other words in most cases humans have a neuro-bank full of ready-made predicative templates available to be applied to any provisional denotatum. The copula /is/ syntactically refers back to and agrees with the self instantiated singularity *Freddie Fernakerpan.* The sentence "Freddie Fernakerpanis eating ice cream" contains the appropriate singular form of the present continuous - /is/ followed by the present participle /eating/.


THE IS OF EXISTENCE MYTH
That's it! That is all there is to it! The secret behind the infamous confusion between the spurious entiative FACT that an entity exists versus a simple statement of the descriptive existential modality of a subject is anticlimactic. The copulae: "was, were, am, is and are" are operative variables that point to that part of a sentence which describes the subject's existential state or states.”

So much for the collective confusion that we have inherited from obsessively creationist historical commentators like Aquinas and his black habited cohabitors. So much too for modern transcendentalists, who, imprinted since birth with a debilitating notions of an ontological duality, continue to insist on attributing unworldly complexity to real objects. Contrary to our mutual brainwashing as children, copulae are not grammatical elements designed specifically to act as meaningless catenulate links syntactically connecting elements of a sentence.

There is no *is of existence.* The so-called copula /is/ never, ever bespeaks of the FACT that something exists (is simply present in the world bereft of any properties) but always functions in the essive case of, relating to, or being the grammatical case indicating a state of being or an existence in a particular capacity or state.

The so-called * is of existence* lacks any factual basis and not one shred of historical validity for the instantiaton of ALL nouns is neurologically spontaneous. Ontological opinion regarding their actual entiative status or pseudo transcendental (entitive) presence in the world is provided by the addressor and the addressee respectively.

Sentential Addresses.
When we speak of a copula we really mean a numero-temporal variable that points to the existential modalic information contained at a predicative sentential address. When we talk about a copula "referring backwards" to the self-instantiating head subject we mean whatever instantiated subject is to be descriptively reconciled with its predicate. We “dereference” or "scan the data of a copula by retrieving the semantic value of the information available at the predicative address. De-referencing occurs in copula-depletive languages like Russian and most Semitic languages where the copula is dispensed with as intuitively unnecessary in the present continuous. i.e *Ivan soldat.* (Ivan is a soldier.*)

With regard to literary exposition and style I agree completely with the Korzybskian-style e-prime abandoment or at least a curtailment of /be/ and its conjugates in speech and writing.  It is truly time to initiate a long overdue turn away from the expression-stifling convenience of the confining copula.