Anton Marty was a professor of philosophy at the German University of Prague and for forty years a close associate of Franz Brentano. Marty's most important work is the Untersuchungen zur Grundlegung der allgemeinen Sprachtheorie (Halle, 1908), a treatise on the philosophy of language. His theory of meaning, or "semasiology," is based upon Brentano's descriptive psychology. From a contemporary point of view, the most interesting aspects of this theory are the distinction between categorematic and syncategorematic uses of words and the theory of emotive utterances.

Like Brentano, Marty appeals to the correctness of affirmation and rejection, and of love and hate (in a broad sense) to explicate the syncategorematic character of certain basic philosophical concepts. In the assertion "There is a horse," the words "a horse" refer to an object, but the words "there is" serve only to express the fact that the speaker is...