ABSTRACT
Of the parts of speech, three are specially important: substantives, adjectives and verbs. Among substantives, some are derived from adjectives or verbs, as humanity from human, or sequence from follows. (I am not speaking of an etymological derivation, but of a logical one.) Others, such as proper names, or space, time and matter, are not derivative, but appear primarily as substantives. What we wish to obtain is a classification, not of words, but of
ideas; I shall therefore call adjectives or predicates all notions which are capable of being such, even in a form in which grammar would call them substantives. The fact is, as we shall see, that human and humanity denote precisely the same concept, these words being employed respectively according to the kind of relation in which this concept stands to the other constituents of a proposition in which it occurs. The distinction which we require is not identical with the grammatical distinction between substantive and adjective, since one single concept may, according to circumstances, be either substantive or adjective: it is the distinction between proper and general names that we require, or rather between the objects indicated by such names. In every proposition, as we saw in Chapter 3, we may make an analysis into something asserted and something about which the assertion is made. A proper name, when it occurs in a proposition, is always, at least according to one of the possible ways of analysis (where there are several), the subject that the proposition or some subordinate constituent proposition is about, and not what is said about the subject. Adjectives and verbs, on the other hand, are capable of occurring in propositions in which they cannot be regarded as subject, but only as parts of the assertion. Adjectives are distinguished by capacity for denoting-a term which I intend to use in a technical sense to be discussed in Chapter 5. Verbs are distinguished by a special kind of connection, exceedingly hard to define, with truth and falsehood, in virtue of which they distinguish an asserted proposition from an unasserted one, e.g. “Caesar died” from “the death of Caesar”. These distinctions must now be amplified, and I shall begin with the distinction between general and proper names.
