‘To be’ or not ‘to be’: an analysis of copula production and omission in people with non-fluent aphasia

Figures & data

Table

(1)
(a) Bob is a frog	(c) Bob is wise
(b) Bob is in the castle	(d) Bob is sleepy

Figure 1. Syntactic representations of (a) Individual-level predicates inflectional specification and (b) Stage-level predicates aspectual specification (Becker, 2002).

Table 1. Irregular conjugation of copula to be in present and past tense.

Person	Subject Pronoun	Present	Past
1sg	I	am	was
2sg	you	are	were
3sg	he/ she/ it	is	was
1pl	we	are	were
2pl	you (lot)	are	were
3pl	they	are	were

Table 2. Number of words, mean length of utterance in morphemes (MLU) and number of copula contexts for each subject.

	Subject	MLUm (sd)	N Words	N Utterances	N Copula Contexts
1	ACWT01a	3.82 (2.51)	267	81	7
2	Adler16a	4.86 (3.37)	508	113	6
3	Adler25a	3.26 (2.42)	536	192	12
4	BU07a	4.17 (2.82)	715	190	14
5	Elman06a	4.02 (2.96)	652	181	18
6	Fridriksson12a	4.32 (2.48)	1079	288	13
7	Kempler03a	4.39 (2.77)	691	183	22
8	Kempler04a	3.63 (2.53)	545	182	9
9	Kurland13a	3.53 (2.42)	321	105	11
10	Kurland24a	6.29 (4.20)	379	73	5
11	Kurland29b	3.87 (3.01)	408	130	5
12	MSU05a	6.19 (4.08)	520	94	5
13	Scale01a	4.70 (3.16)	765	187	12
14	Scale18a	4.69 (3.02)	402	98	11
15	Scale31a	5.69 (3.92)	950	206	29
16	Whiteside15a	5.11 (1.84)	1061	239	16

Table 3. Examples for predicates in different grammatical categories.

Individual-Level Predicate	Stage-Level Predicate
Nominal complement	Locative complement
Adjectival complement: encoding inherent, physical features	Adjectival complement: encoding impermanent, accidental features

Figure 2. Correct and incorrect production of subject-copula agreement by each participant.

Figure 3. Number of overt copula (1) and omitted copula (0) productions for each predicate type.

Figure 4. Number of copula omissions (0) and overt copula (1) productions in each complement type.

Figure 5. Proportion of copula omissions (0) and overt copula (1) production for each subject type.

Becker, M. (2002). The development of the copula in child English: The lightness of be. Annual Review of Language Acquisition, 2(1), 37–58.

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