This is part of archived UD v1 documentation. See http://universaldependencies.org/ for the current version.
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cop: copula

A copula is the relation between the complement of a copular verb and the copular verb essere (in Italian this is the only verb that can be a copula). The copula be is not treated as the head of a clause, but rather as the dependent of a lexical predicate, as exemplified below, which can be an adjective, a noun or a pronoun.

In predicative wh-constructions, the fronted wh-word is the head, and the copula is another cop.

If the copula comes together another verbal auxiliaries (e.g. because of the tense), they are taken as dependents of the lexical predicate:

The verb essere is not always marked as copula, but can also be the main verb of the clause. This analysis is generally adopted when:


Treebank Statistics (UD_Italian)

This relation is universal.

3032 nodes (1%) are attached to their parents as cop.

2419 instances of cop (80%) are right-to-left (child precedes parent). Average distance between parent and child is 1.65798153034301.

The following 10 pairs of parts of speech are connected with cop: ADJ-VERB (1153; 38% instances), NOUN-VERB (1020; 34% instances), PRON-VERB (696; 23% instances), PROPN-VERB (68; 2% instances), VERB-VERB (34; 1% instances), ADV-VERB (32; 1% instances), NUM-VERB (23; 1% instances), X-VERB (3; 0% instances), ADJ-AUX (2; 0% instances), SYM-VERB (1; 0% instances).


cop in other languages: [bg] [cs] [de] [el] [en] [es] [eu] [fa] [fi] [fr] [ga] [he] [hu] [it] [ja] [ko] [sv] [u]
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