What are all the words that make up a complete list of linking verbs in English?
Solution 1:
In your list, only the various forms of be (the first eight) and become, seem, appear, look, smell, taste, sound and feel are copular verbs. Others include remain, keep, stay, get, go, come, grow, prove, turn, turn out, end up and wind up.
Solution 2:
Barry quotes Longman:
[Link verbs] are, in the words of the Longman Grammar, verbs that ‘report a state of existence or a logical relationship that exists between entities.’ He adds: They are ‘used to associate an attribute with the subject of the clause. The attribute is usually expressed by the subject predicative following the verb.’
To which John Lawler replies:
That's not a grammatical description, however; just about every predicate in our language "reports a state of existence or a logical relationship that exists between entities". It's certainly not a definition that can be used to construct tests to see whether a particular verb qualifies.
Cobuild ( https://arts-ccr-002.bham.ac.uk/ccr/patgram/ch01.html ) (Section 6) simply classifies constructions in this area from the surface structure:
6 V adj
The verb is followed by an adjective group. This pattern has one structure:
Verb with Complement [there is a preceding subject not mentioned here by Cobuild]
I was hungry.
Though I must point out that
happy , say, in she looked happy is obviously a complement (in the sense of being grammatically obligatory) whereas young in my father died young isn't, and
happy , say, in she was happy is obviously modifying (specifying an attribute of) the subject whereas unnoticed in she passed unnoticed looks more to be modifying the manner of her passing (ie has a suspiciously adverbial flavour),
this is a start for analysing this structure / these structures. And Cobuild give a comprehensive semantic breakdown of which verbs appear in such structures.
Solution 3:
As I use the term, English only has one copula: the verb "to be". The object of a copula takes nominative case, not accusative, so "It is I" not "*It is me." (Although some people do accept this usage for some reason.) Also, in formal semantics, the copula disappears. So "John is a man" turns into something like "exists(x) {John(x) and man(x)"}
None of the other verbs on the list meets either of those tests. For example, we have to say "John smells him"; no one accepts "*John smells he." Semantically, "John smells a man" becomes "exists(x,y) {man(x) and John(y) and smells(y,x)}
I've heard of "psuedo-copulas," but none of my graduate-level linguistics classes had any use for the distinction. I suspect the modern notion of theta roles eliminated the need for a special category of pseudo-copulas. That is, we can specify that "to smell" is a transitive verb that can take either a noun phrase or an adjective phrase as a direct object.
Carnie has a good explanation of theta roles. Heim describes the copula in semantics.