  Making a statement (true or false) requires three steps (cf. Frede 1992, who mentions two steps): first, the speaker must pick out an individual or kind to say something about, since a statement must be about something to be a statement at all; second, he must pick out an individual, kind, or feature to relate to the original entity; and third, he asserts a relation between the two items—identity, non-identity, attribution, or non-attribution. A statement consists minimally of two parts, with one part (the grammatical subject) referring to the entity the statement is about, and the other (the predicate) asserting something about that entity. Only if the predicate states something (that is or is not the case) about a subject is there a complex—a statement—that can be true or false (Sophist 262e–263d). The Stranger distinguishes between names and verbs (Sophist 261d–262a), saying that a verb is a sign set over actions, and a name a sign set over things that perform the actions. No statement consists simply of a string of names or a string of verbs but must minimally fit a name together with a verb (Sophist 262a–c).