A semantic analysis of multiple copulas in English and Arabic with reference to the glorious Quran

الملخص EN

In this paper, multiple copulas in English and Arabic are investigated.

It is argued that the copula ''kana'' in Arabic has multi categorial status.

It can be a verb-type copula, tense-type copula, and descriptive - type copula.

The three types of copulas are different words that have the same form, i.

e.

, homonyms.

The verb-type copula has verbal properties, whereas the tense-type and descriptive-type copulas are semantically empty.

Becker's views in her papers English Has Two Copulas (2002) and Is isn't Be (2004) have been taken into consideration in this paper.

Becker (2002, 2004) argues that it is usual for a language to have multiple copulas.

This argument is supported and confirmed in this paper.

The different types of copulas in some ayyas from the Glorious Quran are investigated with six English translations to show which kind of copula occurs more than the other types and how the meaning of copula in Arabic is translated into English.

The results show that the descriptive copula in Arabic appears more than the other types (42.1% ) then the verb copula (27.3% ).

The descriptive copula is translated correctly into present tense copula (58.3% ), which is used for description and identification in English.

The verb copula, which has different meanings in Arabic, is translated into different non-copula verbs in English (56.6% ).

Furthermore, the different types of copulas in Arabic are translated by using different structures.

However, some translators succeeded to convey the meaning of the copula كان kana, but others failed to do that.

In many translations, there is mismatching between copula in Arabic and English, which results in the semantic loss of the meaning of copula in the Glorious Quran.