Copulas?

Inflected copulas will be marked AUX and given a cop arc

copulas, will be marked as AUX and have an incoming cop arc, just as the simpler copula ni would. Though the UD documentation states:

The cop relation should only be used for pure copulas that add at most TAME categories to the meaning of the predicate, which means that most languages have at most one copula, and only when the nonverbal predicate is treated as the head of the clause.

According to Mohammed, (2001), there are several forms of copulars.

Ni

predication without a verb

used to indicate present time references

Ni can also be at the beginning of the sentence to indicate emphasis.

ni yeye anayepika sasa
be 3S 3S-PRES-3S.REL-COOK now It is she who it cooking now

In these constructions, the verb cooking has a relative marker 'ye' indicating that it is

Si

Functions very similar to Ni but indicates a negated copula

Ndi-

an emphatic version of the ni copula with noun class/person/number agreement with the subject of the copula.

Si-

An emphatic version of the Si copula with noun class/person/number agreement with the subject of the copula.

-ko

a locative copula indicating location without a specific reference.

-po

a locative copula indicating location with a specified reference.

-mo

a locative copula indicating location inside or around something.

-na

these indicate location in combination with a locative. (kuna, pana, mna).

yu

A rare copula that can be used when the subject is 3rd person animate.

u

A rare copula that can be used when the subject is 3rd person human.

Is kuwa a copula?

kuwa is a weird one. It semantically is similar to a copula but it can have so many different morphemes added like a regular verb. It's also not the reduced forms that we see for the other copulas.

I will still treat kuwa as a copula becuase in other languages with inflected copulas like German, they stil use the cop relation. (though german doesn't have both inflected copulas and relatively bare copulas).