Editing Copula (linguistics) (section)

=== Muylaq' Aymaran ===

Uniquely, the existence of the copulative verbalizer suffix in the Southern Peruvian [[Aymara language|Aymaran]] language variety, Muylaq' Aymara, is evident only in the surfacing of a vowel that would otherwise have been deleted because of the presence of a following suffix, lexically prespecified to suppress it. As the copulative verbalizer has no independent phonetic structure, it is represented by the Greek letter ʋ in the examples used in this entry.

Accordingly, unlike in most other Aymaran variants, whose copulative verbalizer is expressed with a vowel-lengthening component, -'':'', the presence of the copulative verbalizer in Muylaq' Aymara is often not apparent on the surface at all and is analyzed as existing only meta-linguistically. However, in a verb phrase such as "It is old", the noun {{lang|ay|thantha}} {{gloss|old}} does not require the copulative verbalizer: {{lang|ay|thantha-wa}} {{gloss|It is old}}.

It is now pertinent to make some observations about the distribution of the copulative verbalizer. The best place to start is with words in which its presence or absence is obvious. When the vowel-suppressing first person simple tense suffix attaches to a verb, the vowel of the immediately preceding suffix is suppressed (in the examples in this subsection, the subscript "c" appears prior to vowel-suppressing suffixes in the interlinear gloss to better distinguish instances of [[Vowel deletion|deletion]] that arise from the presence of a lexically pre-specified suffix from those that arise from other (e.g. phonotactic) motivations). Consider the verb {{lang|ay|sara-}}, which is inflected for the first person simple tense and so, predictably, loses its final root vowel: {{lang|ay|sar(a)-<sub>c</sub>t-wa}} {{gloss|I go}}.

However, prior to the suffixation of the first person simple suffix {{lang|ay|-<sub>c</sub>t}} to the same root nominalized with the agentive nominalizer {{lang|ay|-iri}}, the word must be verbalized. The fact that the final vowel of {{lang|ay|-iri}} below is not suppressed indicates the presence of an intervening segment, the copulative verbalizer: {{lang|ay|sar(a)-iri-ʋ-t-wa}} {{gloss|I usually go}}.

It is worthwhile to compare of the copulative verbalizer in Muylaq' Aymara as compared to La Paz Aymara, a variant which represents this suffix with vowel lengthening. Consider the near-identical sentences below, both translations of "I have a small house" in which the nominal root {{lang|ay|uta-ni}} {{gloss|house-attributive}} is verbalized with the copulative verbalizer, but the correspondence between the copulative verbalizer in these two variants is not always a strict one-to-one relation.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Coler |first=Matt |year=2015 |title=A Grammar of Muylaq' Aymara: Aymara as spoken in Southern Peru |series=Brill's Studies in the Indigenous Languages of the Americas |publisher=Brill |pages=472–476 |isbn=978-9-00-428380-0}}</ref>

:{| border="0" cellspacing="2" cellpadding="1"
| align=left |  || align=right |  || align=left |
|-
| La Paz Aymara:
| {{lang|ay|ma: jisk'a uta-ni-:-<sub>c</sub>t(a)-wa}}
|-
| Muylaq' Aymara:
| {{lang|ay|ma isk'a uta-ni-ʋ-<sub>c</sub>t-wa}}
|}