Zero copula

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. One can distinguish languages that simply do not have a copula and languages that have a copula that is optional in certain contexts.
Dropping the copula is also found, to a lesser extent, in English and many other languages, used most frequently in rhetoric, casual speech, non-standard varieties, and headlinese, the writing style used in newspaper headlines. Sometimes, these omissions cause unintended syntactic ambiguity.

In English

exhibits a few limited forms of the zero copula. One is found in comparative correlatives like "the bigger, the better" and "the more the merrier". However, no known natural language lacks this structure, and it is not clear how a comparative is joined with its correlate in this kind of copula. Zero copula also appears in casual questions and statements like "you from out of town?" and "enough already!" where the verb may be omitted due to syncope. It can also be found, in a slightly different and more regular form, in the headlines of English newspapers, where short words and articles are generally omitted to conserve space. For example, a headline would more likely say "Parliament at a standstill" than "Parliament is at a standstill". Because headlines are generally simple, in "A is B" statements, an explicit copula is rarely necessary.
Zero copulae are very common in sports announcing. For example: "Johnson already with two hits today." "Unitas with a lot of time."
The zero copula is far more common in some varieties of Caribbean creoles and African American Vernacular English, where phrases like "Where you at?" and "Who she?" can occur. As in Russian and Arabic, where the copula can only be omitted in the present tense, the copula can only be omitted in African American Vernacular English when it can be contracted in Standard American English.

In other languages

Omission frequently depends on the tense and use of the copula.

Bengali

In Bengali zero copula is usually found in the present tense when describing the state or adjectival properties of a subject, when alongside a prepositional phrase, or with the adverb 'here' or 'there'. For example, in the sentence,

আমরা এখানে,

the copula আছি is omitted, and in

আমার নাম ফাতিমা,

the possessive noun phrase and the name are always placed together.

Russian

In Russian the copula бы́ть is normally omitted in the present tense, but not in the past and future tenses:
Present :

Она́ до́ма, i.e., "She is now at home, in the house"

Past :

Она́ была́ до́ма

The third person plural су́ть is still used in some standard phrases, but since it is a homonym of the noun "essence", most native speakers do not notice it to be a verb:

Они́ су́ть одно́ и то́ же.

The verb бы́ть is the infinitive of "to be". The third person singular, есть, means "is". As a copula, it can be inflected into the past, "future", and conditional forms. A present tense exists; however, it is almost never used as a copula, but rather omitted altogether or replaced by the verb явля́ться. Thus one can say:

Она́ бы́ла краса́вицей —predicate noun in instrumental case.
Она краса́вица —predicate noun in the nominative case.
Она явля́ется краса́вицей —predicate noun also in instrumental.

But not usually:

Она́ есть краса́вица, which would be very formal and would suggest something more than a copula, something more existential than the normal English use of "is". As a result, this construction is quite rare.

But in some cases the verb бы́ть in the present tense is employed: Бу́дь тем, кто ты есть.
The present tense of the copula in Russian was in common use well into the 19th century but is now used only for archaic effect.

Turkic languages

There is a contrast between the regular verb "to be" and the copulative/auxiliary verb "to be" in Turkish.
The auxiliary verb imek shows its existence only through suffixes to predicates that can be nouns, adjectives or arguably conjugated verb stems, arguably being the only irregular verb in Turkish. In the third person, zero copula is the rule, as in Hungarian or Russian. For example:
The essential copula is possible in the third person singular:
In Tatar, dir expresses doubt rather than a characteristic. The origin of dir is the verb durmak, with a similar meaning to the Latin stare.
In the modern Tatar language copula is a disappearing grammatical phenomenon and is only rarely used with the first and second person. In the past there was a full paradigm for all persons:
For example: Мин укытучымын, Син укытучысың, Ул укытучыдыр. While the copulas for the first and second person are historically derived from personal pronouns, the third person copula comes from the verb тор. For negation the copula affix is attached to the negative particle түгел : Мин язучы түгелмен. The copula is only used with nouns. Sometimes the noun can be in the locative case: Сез өйдәсез.

Japanese

In Japanese, the copula is not used with predicative adjectives, such as. It is sometimes omitted with predicative nouns and adjectival nouns in non-past tense, such as, but is necessary for marking past tense or negation, as in. It is also sometimes omitted in wh-questions, such as.

Māori

In Māori, the zero copula can be used in predicative expressions and with continuous verbs — He nui te whare, literally "a big the house", "the house big"; I te tēpu te pukapuka, literally "at the table the book", "the book on the table"; Nō Ingarangi ia, literally "from England he", "he from England"; Kei te kai au, literally "at the eating I", "I eating"

Arabic

In Arabic, a Semitic language, the use of the zero copula again depends on the context. In the present tense affirmative, when the subject is definite and the predicate is indefinite, the subject is simply juxtaposed with its predicate. When both the subject and the predicate are definite, a pronoun may be inserted between the two. For example:

محمد مهندس, "Muhammad is an engineer"
محمد هو المهندس, "Muhammad is the engineer'

The extra pronoun is highly recommended in order for one not to confuse the predicate for a qualifying adjective:

محمد المهندس, "Muhammad the engineer'

In the past tense, however, or in the present tense negative, the verbs kāna and laysa are used, which take the accusative case:

كان محمد مهندسًا, "Muhammad was an engineer'
محمد ليس مهندسًا, "Muhammad is not an engineer'

When the copula is expressed with a verb, no pronoun need be inserted, regardless of the definiteness of the predicate:

محمد ليس بالمهندس, "Muhammad is not the engineer'

Hebrew, another Semitic language, uses zero copula in a very similar way.

Ganda

The Ganda verb "to be", -li, is used in only two cases: when the predicate is a prepositional phrase and when the subject is a pronoun and the predicate is an adjective:

Ali mulungi, "She is beautiful'
Kintu ali mu mmotoka, "Kintu is in the car"

Otherwise, the zero copula is used:

Omuwala mulungi, "The girl is beautiful"

Here the word mulungi, "beautiful" is missing its initial vowel pre-prefix o-. If included, it would make the adjective qualify the noun omuwala attributively:

Omuwala omulungi, "The beautiful girl' or "a beautiful girl".
American Sign Language

does not have a copula. For example, "my hair is wet" is signed my hair wet, and "my name is Pete" may be signed ^topic P-E-T-E.

Irish

The copula is is used in Irish but may be omitted in the present tense. For example, Is fear mór é can be expressed as simply Fear mór é. The common phrase Pé scéal é also omits the copula.

Welsh

The fact that Welsh often requires the use of a predicative particle to denote non-definite predicates means that the copula can be omitted in certain phrases. For example, the phrase Ac yntau'n ddyn byr... literally translates as "And he a short man...". The zero copula is especially common in Welsh poetry of the Medieval Welsh literature style.

Amerindian languages

, as well as some other Amerindian languages, has no copula. Instead of using a copula, it is possible to conjugate nouns or adjectives like verbs.
Grammarians and other comparative linguists, however, do not consider this to constitute a zero copula but rather an affixal copula. Affixal copulae are not unique to Amerindian languages but can be found, for instance, in Korean and in the Eskimo languages.
Many indigenous languages of South America do, however, have true zero copulae in which no overt free or bound morpheme is present when one noun is equated with another. In fact, zero-copula is likely to occur in third-person contexts in Southern Quechua.
Yaghan, from Tierra del Fuego, used, in its heyday back in the mid-19th century, zero copula as one option, when introducing new participants in discourse, but had a slew of posture-based copular verbs for all other contexts. So I could say, kvnji-u:a Jon. kvnji 'this', u:a 'man', but once John has been introduced I might say, Jon lvpatvx-wvshta:gu:a mu:ta 'John is a woodworker', lvpatvx 'wood', wvshta:gu: 'work' u:a 'man', mu:ta irregular present tense form of mu:tu: 'to be '

Chinese

, as well as many other Chinese dialects, uses a copula, such as the Mandarin word shì, before nouns in predications, like in Wŏ shì Zhōngguó rén, but not usually before verbs or adjectives. For example, saying Wǒ shì kāixīn is a grammatically incorrect sentence, but saying Wǒ kāixīn, is correct. Adverbs can be added to the adjective, like in Wǒ hĕn kāixīn. A copula may be used for adjectives, however, if the particle de is added after the adjective, like in Wǒ shì kāixīn de.