On Tense and Copular Verbs in Nonverbal Predications in Sakha

It is well-known that in many languages copular verbs are not needed with nonverbal predicates when the clause is in present tense, but are needed in other tenses. Hebrew (Rapoport 1987), Arabic (Benmamoun 2000), Russian, and Turkish (Wetzer 1996: 52, Stassen 1997: 46, Baker 2003) are relatively familiar languages that fit this profile. A less familiar example is Sakha (also known as Yakut), a Turkic language spoken in Siberia. (1) shows that no copular/auxiliary verb is needed in the present tense in Sakha; rather, subject agreement attaches directly to the predicate regardless of its category. The same morpheme representing present tense and first person agreement features, -bit and its allomorphs, can attach to all three lexical categories (Vinokurova 2005):