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Being a very commonly used verb, it is likely that the copula has irregular inflected forms; in English, the verb be has a number of highly irregular forms and has more different inflected forms than any other English verb (am, is, are, was, were, etc.; see English verbs for details). Other copulas show more resemblances to pronouns.
Other functions vary from language to language. For example, although in its basic meanings, to be is a stative verb, English puts it to work as a dynamic verb in fixed collocations (You are being very annoying). The copula is the most irregular verb in many Indo-European languages.
English has derivational morphology that parallels ergativity in that it operates on intransitive verbs and objects of transitive verbs. With certain intransitive verbs, adding the suffix "-ee" to the verb produces a label for the person performing the action: "John has retired" → "John is a retiree" "John has escaped" → "John is an escapee"
The use of the participle mood (at present tense, inherited from the Latin gerundive) has almost completely fallen out of use in modern French for denoting the continuous aspect of verbs, but remains used for other aspects like simultaneity or causality, and this participle mood also competes with the infinitive mood (seen as a form of ...
In addition, modern English forms are given for comparison purposes. Nouns are given in their nominative case, with the genitive case supplied in parentheses when its stem differs from that of the nominative. (For some languages, especially Sanskrit, the basic stem is given in place of the nominative.) Verbs are given in their "dictionary form".
The English verb "to be" does not have a direct equivalent in Chinese. In an English sentence where "to be" leads to an adjective ("It is blue"), there is no "to be" in Chinese. (There are no adjectives in Chinese, instead there are stative verbs that do not need an extra verb.)
Romance languages, such as French, are normally verb-framed, and Germanic languages, such as English, are satellite-framed. This means that when expressing motion events, English speakers typically express manner in the verb, and French speakers (like Italian, Portuguese and Spanish speakers) typically express path in the verb, and either leave out the manner of motion completely or express it ...
Weather verbs often appear to be impersonal (subjectless, or avalent) in null-subject languages like Spanish, where the verb llueve means "It rains". In English, French and German, they require a dummy pronoun and therefore formally have a valency of 1. As verbs in Spanish incorporate the subject as a TAM suffix, Spanish is not actually a null ...