Even an epithet or a suffix may imply a proposition: _This personage_ may mean _X is a pretentious nobody_.
How shall we interpret such illusive predications except by cultivating our literary perceptions, by reading the most significant authors until we are at home with them?
But, no doubt, to disentangle the compound propositions, and to expand the abbreviations of literature and conversation, is a useful logical exercise.

And if it seem a laborious task thus to reduce to its logical elements a long argument in a speech or treatise, it should be observed that, as a rule, in a long discourse only a few sentences are of principal importance to the reasoning, the rest being explanatory or illustrative digression, and that a close scrutiny of these cardinal sentences will frequently dispense us from giving much attention to the rest.
Sec.4.But now, returning to the definition of a Proposition given in Sec.

2, that it is 'a sentence in which one term is predicated of another,' we must consider what is the import of such predication.

For the definition, as it stands, seems to be purely Nominalist.

Is a proposition nothing more than a certain synthesis of words; or, is it meant to correspond with something further, a synthesis of ideas, or a relation of facts?
Conceptualist logicians, who speak of judgments instead of propositions, of course define the judgment in their own language.
According to Hamilton, it is "a recognition of the relation of congruence or confliction in which two concepts stand to each other." To lighten the sentence, I have omitted one or two qualifications (Hamilton's _Lectures on Logic_, xiii.).