"No copula, no problem"

This is a followup to yesterday's post about crash blossoms, in the comments to which an anonymous reader clued me in to the term "zero copula":

Zero copula is a linguistic phenomenon whereby the subject is joined to the predicate without overt marking of this relationship (like the copula 'to be' in English)... used most frequently in rhetoric and casual speech...

Standard English exhibits a very limited form of the zero copula, common in statements like "The higher, the better"; "The more, the merrier"...

Zero copula also appears in casual questions and statements like "You from out of town?"; "Enough already!" where the verb (and more) may be omitted due to syncope. Apart from syncope, the zero copula is probably not used productively in standard English.

The zero copula is far more productive in Caribbean creoles and African American Vernacular English, some varieties of which regularly omit the copula. For instance, "You crazy!", "Where you at?" and "Who she?" As in Russian, this is the case only in the present tense. In past-tense sentences, the copula must be specified...

The zero copula is also present, in a slightly different and more regular form, in the headlines of English newspapers, where short words and articles are generally omitted to conserve space. For example, a headline would more likely say "Gulf coast in ruins" than "Gulf coast is in ruins"... 

The Wikipedia page goes on to discuss zero copula in languages other than English (note zero copula is standard in American Sign Language).