copulant

copulant (plural copulants)

1. One engaged in sexual union.
   • 1929 September, George K. K. Link, “Reproduction in Thallophytes, with special reference to fungi”, in The Botanical Gazette, volume 88, number 1:

     Those which produce copulable copulants in one individual are designated as monoecious, while those in which copulable copulants must come from different individuals are considered dioecious.

   • 1959, The American Midland Naturalist - Volume 61, page 273:

     Concerning the copulation positions of Turbellaria in general, Hyman (1951a:127) stated, "Usually the copulants face more or less away from each other with the genital regions pressed together and often elevated, the rest of the body attached to the subtratum.

   • 1993, Reproductive Biology of Invertebrates, Accessory Sex Glands, page 7:

     In some turbellarians and monogenetic trematodes, the sperm are first aggregated into spermatophores which are discharged into the fellow copulant (Hyman, 1951).

2. Something that brings other things together into a unified whole.
   • 1912, Emanuel Swedenborg, Alfred Acton, The Animal Kingdom, page 345:

     It is well known from chemistry that a fatty or oily element will not of itself unite with a watery, but must be united by means of saline copulants.

3. (semiotics) A sign that represents the joining or unity of other signs.
   • 1974, Charles Sanders Peirce ·, Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce - Volume 7, page 236:

     The copulants are likewise indispensable and have the property of being Continuant.

   • 2016, Tony Jappy, Peirce’s Twenty-Eight Classes of Signs and the Philosophy of Representation:

     Since the classes are yielded by a static typology and not a dynamic process such as semiosis, it might be wiser to conceive the relation between subjects in terms of compatibility rather than state categorically that collectives determine copulants, for example: collectives are not only with the copulant, but also with the designative and descriptive facets of signs..

   • 2017, Francesco Bellucci, Peirce's Speculative Grammar: Logic as Semiotics:

     Examples of such continuous immediate objects, with respect to which a sign is said to be a copulant, include :_is_," "if_then_," "_relatively to _ for _," "Whatever _," etc..

copulant (not comparable)

1. (semiotics) Signifying combination, identity or union.
   • 1989, Gérard Deledalle, Semiotics and Pragmatics, page 149:

     By virtue of Oi, namely the identity of the weather on that occasion, the sign expresses a distributive relation —to each situation of utterance there corresponds an identifiable weather type: the sign is therefore Copulant.

   • 2017, Francesco Bellucci, Peirce's Speculative Grammar: Logic as Semiotics:

     Copulant signs are, quite clearly, those signs whose immediate object is a continuous predicate.

   • 2023, Tony Jappy, Developing a Neo-Peircean Approach to Signs, page 106:

     If the sign is copulant it is necessarily collective, and if it is an action-producing token, it is necessarily also categorical and percussive.

copulant

1. gerund of copular

• IPA^(key): /kɔ.py.lɑ̃/

copulant

1. present participle of copuler

cōpulant

1. third-person plural present active indicative of cōpulō