Predication

Some sentences have a very simple structure, consisting only of a part which serves to pick out a particular object and a part which says something about the object picked out. Expressions which can be used to say something about objects picked out are called predicates. Thus ‘smokes’ in ‘Sam smokes’ is a predicate. But ‘predication’ may refer either to the activity of predicating or to what is predicated. To understand either we need to know what predicates are and how they combine with other expressions.