Grammatically, how does「である」work?


In「である」、my previous understanding was that the「で」functions the same way as the
"method/means" particle「で」by making **everything** that came before it
attached to「で」and that「ある」is just regular「ある」just like usual.

However, I have been told elsewhere that this「で」is a copula. This begs the
question as to why it is _before_ 「ある」。 Furthermore, whenever I see a chart of
です conjugations, I don't see「で」on it. So, is the「で」functioning as a copula for
the preceding portion of its clause? If so, then why is it not「だ」？

I also have a comprehensive Japanese Linguistics book here, but its
explanation (while extremely thorough like a legal text) does not describe how
it works.




Broadly, で is just the conjunctive form of だ・です, as in "`[statement 1]` is,
and `[statement 2]`". The ある after that, if used to end the sentence, is just
the copular ある: "is, am, are, will be" etc. This kind of usage is rather
stuffy and formal, and archaic.

In most cases in modern Japanese, you'll see である _not_ at the end of a
sentence, but in cases where the "is-ness" of whatever came before is used
_attributively_ to modify something else. 犬【いぬ】だ "[it] is a dog" →
犬【いぬ】[で]{●}[あ]{●}[る]{●}動物【どうぶつ】 "the animal **that is** a dog". So one way of
thinking about である is as the 連体形【れんたいけい】 or **attributive** form of だ・です.

