Meaning of predication with special reference to the copula

“Ram will attend the hearing tomorrow.” There is no word ‘is’ anywhere in that sentence — yet in logical form it becomes ‘Ram is one who will attend the hearing tomorrow’. Logic insists on dragging an ‘is’ into every single proposition, no matter what tense or verb the original sentence actually used. That insistence is the copula, and this topic is about exactly what job it is doing.

In two minutes

Predication is the logical act of affirming or denying a predicate of a subject, and the copula is the linking word — is / is not, are / are not — that performs this act, joining subject and predicate into a single categorical proposition regardless of the tense or verb the original English sentence actually used.

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