Exercise 2 from pages 165-166

Read the assigned paragraph, look for differences from standard English with regard to the verb “to be”, or more properly speaking, the copula (the linguistic “equal sign” that in English is usually the verb to be). Standard English forms this takes are “be”, “being”, “am”, “is”, “are”, “was”, “were”, and “been”. However, note also the existence, particularly in vernacular contexts in English, and in other languages spoken around the world, of “null copula”, that is, the absence of any word where we expect one in standard English to fill this same “equal sign” function.

List all such instances of variation of the copula from Standard English in the text, explain what the difference is, and as much as you can, state the reason for the different forms.

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