copula

Etymology

Borrowed from Latin copula (“connection, linking of words”), from co- (“together”) +‎ apere (“fasten”). Doublet of couple.

Pronunciation

• (Received Pronunciation) IPA^(key): /ˈkɒpjʊlə/

• Audio (Southern England):

  (file)

• (UK) IPA^(key): /ˈkɒpjələ/
• (US) IPA^(key): /ˈkɑpjələ/, /ˈkɔpjələ/
• Rhymes: -ɒpjələ
• Hyphenation: cop‧u‧la

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”, in 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”, in 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, edited by Natalia Gagarina and Insa Gülzow, Strategies in the L1-Acquisition of Predication: The Copula Construction in German and Croatian, 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. The bond or relationship by which two things are combined into a unity.
   • 1912, Emanuel Swedenborg, Alfred Acton, The Animal Kingdom, page 345:

     The fact that in milk the copula or bond is exceedingly slight is evident from the spontaneous resolution of milk when left in a vessel, its resolution, namely, into cream—a white substance of comparative consistency,—and a sourish fluid; also from its ready resolution when, merely by motion, it is turned into butter, or, by heat, into various kinds of curds.

   • 2019, Ahti-Veikko Pietarinen, History and Applications, page 401:

     I quite correctly defined logical copulation by means [of] the copula of inclusion.

3. (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”, in 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”, in 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).

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

See also

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

References

• “copula”, in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam, 1913, →OCLC.
• “copula”, in The Century Dictionary […], New York, N.Y.: The Century Co., 1911, →OCLC.

Anagrams

• coupla, cupola, pocula

Verb

copula

1. inflection of copular:
   1. third-person singular present indicative
   2. second-person singular imperative

Etymology

Borrowed from Latin copula. Doublet of koppel.

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /ˈkoː.py.laː/

• Audio:

  (file)

• Hyphenation: co‧pu‧la

Noun

copula f (plural copula's or copulae)

1. (grammar) copula
2. (ichthyology, dated) a connective segment or piece of tissue, usually of cartilage, chiefly in fish

Pronunciation

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

Verb

copula

1. third-person singular past historic of copuler

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /ˈkɔ.pu.la/
• Rhymes: -ɔpula
• Hyphenation: cò‧pu‧la

Etymology 1

Borrowed from Latin cōpula, contraction of an earlier form *coapula. Doublet of coppia, which was inherited.

Etymology 2

See the etymology of the corresponding lemma form.

Further reading

• copula in Treccani.it – Vocabolario Treccani on line, Istituto dell'Enciclopedia Italiana

Anagrams

• cupola