14 Nov r. 1815

Chrestomathia

IV Nomenclature

Grammatical Sketch

Adjuncts of place and time, whether reducible to qualities? ex.gr. The quality (momentary[?]) of being in such a place, at such a time?

Among names of fictitious entities, the foremost, and these the designation of which is of most immediate necessity to mind-expressing converse are qualities.

Note (a)?

qualities being taken in the largest sense of which the word is susceptible: Is it that which in its import is coextensive with the applicability of the word so much used in the Aristotelian Logic School - prædication.

Taking the word proposition in its simplest acceptation, by every proposition the existence of some quality in some subject is asserted. A proposition is any portion of discourse by which the existence of some quality in some subject is asserted. The name of the substance is the noun substantive: the name of the quality is the noun adjective. The word by which the relation between the quality and the substance is indicated - viz. the existence of the one or the other is by logicians called the copula.

By grammarians, on some of the occasions in which by logicians the term copula is employed, the term verb is employed. But it would not by any means be true to say that the word copula and the word Verb are interconvertible - indicative of precisely the same object and nothing more. By the word copula, no more than one single class of words is indicated, viz. the class of words by which intimation is conveyed that in the opinion of the speaker the quality named by him exists in the subject the name of which is pronounced by him at the same time. By the word verb is indicated the cluster of objects the names of which are by grammarians put together and spoken of as constituting all of them together but one Verb: