In this dissertation, I explore the internal compositional nature of the Malayalam copula, aaNu, and the morpho-syntactic and morpho-semantic contributions of the existential morpheme, uNTu. Prior research on these morphemes has labeled them both as copula, because they seem to appear in overlapping distribution in locative and property concept constructions. The goal of this research is to develop a formal analysis that describes the apparent overlapping distribution that aaNu and uNTu share. Temporal, aspectual, and modal (TAM) inflectional agreement morphology are either available on a main verb stem, or they are hosted by the copular auxiliary, aaNu. Since uNTu is unable to host TAM morphology without the help of aaNu, its role as a copula is impeded. Additionally, constructions with uNTu contribute existential meaning to the clause. If aaNu and uNTu occupy the same syntactic slot while contributing different semantic meanings and exhibiting different morpho-syntactic restrictions, a new explanation is needed to account for this so-called overlapping distribution phenomenon. I analyze aaNu as a semantically vacuous copula that can host TAM morphology for specificational and predicational clauses, or it can take on a role as an auxiliary and host TAM information for main verbs. Unlike morphological ordering theories proposed about aaNu in the prior literature, my analysis of aaNu is that the TAM morphological concatenation is compositional in nature - specifically that tense, aspect, and other verbal morphology attach in particular, variable order depending on the syntactic and semantic requirements of the clause. I analyze uNTu as an existential pivot auxiliary that does not occupy the same syntactic slot as aaNu in the derivation. I hypothesize that uNTu contributes existential semantic meaning based on the information structure of a clause, and it signals that there is a syntactic landing site for existentially focused pivots.