Copula (linguistics)

A copula is a word used to link a subject with a predicate.

Quotes

• The logical figure of the absurd, which presents as stringent the contradictory opposite of stringency, negates all the meaningfulness logic seems to provide in order to convict logic of its own absurdity: to convict it of using subject, predicate, and copula to lay out the nonidentical as though it were identical, as though it could be accommodated with forms.
  • Theodor Adorno, Can One Live After Auschwitz? (2003), p. 284

• Ever since sentences started to circulate in brains devoted to reflection, an effort at total identification has been made, because with the aid of a copula each sentence ties one thing to another; all things would be visibly connected if one could discover at a single glance and in its totality the tracings of Ariadne’s thread leading thought into its own labyrinth.
  • Georges Bataille, The Solar Anus (1927)

See also

• Equality
• Equivalence
• Grammar
• Identity
• Logic