suppositio materialisn.

1843 J. S. Mill Syst. Logic I. ii. ii. 29 This employment of a word to denote the mere letters and syllables of which it is composed, was termed by the schoolmen the suppositio materialis of the word.

1884 J. N. Keynes Stud. & Exercises Formal Logic i. i. 3 Any part of speech, or the inflected cases of nouns substantive, may be used categorematically by a suppositio materialis, that is, by speaking of the mere word itself as a thing; for example, ‘John's is a possessive case’, ‘Rich is an adjective’.

1905 A. Wolf Existential Import of Catagorical Predication i. 6 The suppositio materialis is that aspect in which the subject-term is generally used in strictly hermeneutical and etymological statements.

1935 H. Straumann Newspaper Headlines ii. 67 The two sentences: 1. The first line of Gray's Elegy states a proposition, and 2. ‘The first line of Gray's Elegy’ does not state a proposition. Both utterances are true, but in the second case the validity entirely depends on the inverted commas. This phenomenon used to be well known in mediaeval scholasticism under the name of suppositio materialis, and it still plays an essential part in semantics.

1961 Lingua 10 175 The subject of this paper is..how to analyse linguistic signs occurring in suppositio materialis or (as I shall henceforth say) in hypostasis.

2009 T. Aho & M. Yrjο̈nsuuri in L. Haaparanta Devel. Mod. Logic ii. 34 A term has material supposition (suppositio materialis) when it stands for itself. It must be kept in mind that people in the Middle Ages did not use quotation marks.