 Typically, a declarative sentence can be divided into a subject and a predicate: ‘Every star / is purple’, ‘Vega / is a star’, ‘Some politician / lied’, ‘The brightest planet / is visible tonight’, etc. Until quite recently, it was widely held that this grammatical division reflects a corresponding kind of logical structure: the subject of a proposition (i.e., what the proposition is about) is a target for predication. On this view, both ‘Every star’ and ‘Vega’ indicate subjects of propositions in (8), while ‘is’ introduces predicates. Aristotle would have said that in the premises of (8), being purple is predicated of every star, and being a star is predicated of Vega. Later theorists emphasized the contrast between general terms like ‘star’ and singular terms like ‘Vega’, while also distinguishing terms from syncategorematic expressions (e.g., ‘every’ and ‘is’) that can combine with terms to form complex subjects and predicates, including ‘will lie’, ‘can lie’, and ‘may have lied’. But despite the complications, it seemed clear that many propositions have the following canonical form: Subject-copula-Predicate; where a copula links a subject, which may consist of a quantifier and a general term, to a general term. Sentences like ‘Every star twinkles’ can be paraphrased with sentences like ‘Every star is a twinkling thing’. This invites the suggestion that ‘twinkles’ is somehow an abbreviation for ‘is a twinkling thing’.