 In the category of sayables called ‘incomplete,’ the Stoics included predicates and, as in the case of propositions, these are the meanings which we can express through the use of different languages. So the utterance ‘graphei’ in Greek presumably corresponds to the same incomplete sayable as ‘___ writes’ in English. Like some modern theories of predicates, these incomplete lekta are hungry for arguments or what the Stoics would call a nominative case (ptôsis, Diog. Laert., 33G). Curiously the Stoics distinguished between examples where the filling in of the subject that yields a complete sayable happens by means of a referring term (as in ‘Socrates writes’ and cases involving ostensive reference like ‘this one writes’. ‘This one writes’ was called ‘definite’, while ‘Socrates writes’ was predicative or middle – the latter in order to distinguish it from an indefinite predication like ‘someone writes’. The isolation of ostensive reference as a special case gives rise to another odd feature of the Stoic account of meanings and propositions. Standing in the presence of Socrates’ corpse, you can utter the words ‘Socrates is dead’ and your words correspond to a complete lekton (and one that is true at that time). But point to the body and say ‘This one is dead’ and the Stoics seem to have supposed the reference failed in such a way that the sayable ‘is destroyed’ (Alexander, 38F). This odd feature of sayables looms large in the Stoic response to competing accounts of modality. 