Rhetoric

Thetic vs categorical

Thetic judgements are sentences where something just is/is not or happens/is not happening, e.g. “It’s raining”, “God exists”, “I am happy”.

Categorical judgements are sentences in which the predicate describes something about the subject. These follow the usual subject-verb-object arrangement (in English at least), where the object/predicate of the sentence acts upon the subject. These are the most common statements in any language, and easiest to think about.