On the basis of Les verbes français by Dubois and Dubois-Charlier (as well as other valency dictionaries), this article proposes to reconsider the inventory of copular verbs. The lists of copular verbs vary considerably from one inventory to another, which is partially due to the theoretical status of the copular verbs assigned by these inventories, some of them treating copulas the same way a full lexical verbs, others considering them as light verbs. Based on the existing inventories and on corpus analysis, we propose a new, more complete inventory of copular verbs. It adds to the existing lists a certain number of verbs ordinarily taking predicative adjuncts but which happen to integrate a predicative complement under certain circumstances. Our list, moreover, integrates a series of reflexive copular verbs that tend to become autonomous with respect to the corresponding object complement construction. The inventory completed, we take stock of the results obtained. We observe that copular verbs (including être ’to be’) impose all kinds of distributional constraints, whether morpho-syntactic or semantic. We show furthermore that the empirical observations have important consequences for the status and the treatment of copular verbs, both on a methodological and a theoretical level.