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With that basic understanding of the mental language, its significatum and supposition, the question of what terms these mental concepts correspond to within spoken language arises. In expounding upon this, Ockham differentiates between categorematic concepts and syncategorematic concepts. The former are the concepts within the mental language that roughly correspond to our nouns and most verbs, such as: ‘man’ ‘animal’ ‘whiteness’; the latter being concepts that correspond to logical words such as: ‘and’ ‘or’ ‘not.’ Another way of stating that would be to say that the former have a definite and fixed signification, while the latter do not. These categorematic concepts are the basis of propositions, and sentences maintain the structure of: (noun/participle/adjective) (Copula: terms such as is/was/will be) (noun/participle/adjective). The copula may also be thought of as substituting for an identity claim, which would hold that the subject is = to the predicate. Thus, using the example ‘Socrates is (a) human,’ you are making the claim that the particular thing picked out by Socrates is among the things picked out by the concept of human. This can be explained further by stating that when one encounters the person Socrates, they have an intuitive cognition, which is a mental act of the concept of Socrates that is produced through the encounter with him. However, when one is no longer encountering Socrates, he no longer has an intuitive cognition of him since he cannot guarantee his existence; but, that past intuitive cognition can create an abstractive concept of Socrates, such as being human. This relates particulars to one another due to their essential similarities. These abstractive concepts are then called absolute terms and can be related to the idea of universals as mentioned earlier, since they may signify many of a particular thing. It is also important to mention that these absolute terms only have real definitions, which do not define what the thing is, but only express its nature.
