substantify

English

Etymology

From substance +‎ -ify.

Verb

substantify (third-person singular simple present substantifies, present participle substantifying, simple past and past participle substantified)

1. To give material form or substance to; to embody.
   • 1972, Maurice Goldsmith, The Predicament of man:

     With the problems of theory domain and theory focus out of the way, we are now ready to design and set down an integrating construct which will substantify, hold together and make opertional the theoretical framework.

   • 2002, Richard Cross, The Metaphysics of the Incarnation:

     Matthew tries to draw an analogy between the divine person and the divine nature: just as the infinite divine nature can be substantified in many divine persons, so the infinite divine person can substantify many created natures.

   • 2014, Simon Moore, Public Relations and the History of Ideas:

     The First does not need two elements—one being to substantify (give substance to) its “essence”; the other to create or communicate “through which something else comes from it” (alFarabi, 1985, p. 93).

2. To reify or hypostatize; to treat something that is fluid or abstract as a static entity without regard to nuance or change in character.
   • 1966, Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association:

     It is partly because almost inevitably a word, referring to a vague intimation of reality, tends to substantify and reify the insight with time.

   • 1999, Classical and Medieval Literature Criticism, page 52:

     I think that Aristotle may have noticed that pressing the question "When is Y a potential X?" seemed to "substantify" accidental states of bodies, and dimly saw that if one once began to chop up the realm of the indefinite into quasi-unities one would be well on the road to, as we would put it, a law-event framework of scientific explanation as opposed to a thing-nature framework."

   • 2008, Marc Augé, Non-places, page 41:

     In so far as the culturalist view of societies tries to be systematic, its limitations are obvious: to substantify a singular culture is to ignore its intrinsically problematic character (sometimes brought to light, however, by its reactions to other cultures or to the jolts of history);..

   • 2013, Azucena Cruz-Pierre, Donald A. Landes, Exploring the Work of Edward S. Casey:

     One concrete form of determinate presence occurs when you substantify something that has stayed the same over time and therefore you freeze it and you disregard its internal complexity, its interest, its interaction with yourself: its "flow" in a word.

3. To endow with a consciousness, will, motivation and independent existence; to give life to; to hypostatize.
   • 1980, John Ward, The social and religious plays of Strindberg, page 118:

     having reduced the intensity and complexity of His life and Love to bring into existence the upper reaches of the spiritual universe (spiritual substances and atmospheres), then with diminished intensity the lower reaches (forces and motions), until through them He was able to breathe life into organic matter and finally substantify inanimate matter.

   • 1995, Seymour Cain, Gabriel Marcel's Theory of Religious Experience, page 150:

     We see that the refusal to “substantify” particular beings reduces them to mere functions, types of activity, beingless things; for example, when the occupant of a hotel-room is designated by his room-number, when human beings — wife, child, servant - are treated merely pragmatically, for their use-value, or when servants are called by a stock servant-name ( “ Marie” or “ James” ) instead of their own ( for the personal name denotes the unique place of the individual ) .

   • 2008, Jitse M. van der Meer, Scott Mandelbrote, Nature and Scripture in the Abrahamic religions:

     Here Newton identifies the propensity in human language to hypostatize, personify and substantify abstractions.

4. (linguistics) To transform into or treat syntactically as a noun; to make into or use as a substantive.
   • 1913, Arnold Ruge, Wilhelm Windelband, Josiah Royce, Logic - Volume 1, page 194:

     They are, in fact, equivalent to the infinitive which some languages substantify directly (das Rennen, das Sprechen, le manger, le boire, le dormir).

   • 1974, John Mathieson Anderson, Charles Jones, Historical linguistics, page 381:

     Lexical items are more or less the accidental results of transformations which substantify, or 'incorporate', the trees referred to in (i), or constituent parts ('subtrees') of them, into entities which, for reasons of practical economy are labelled with single lexical items.

   • 1981, Annette Karmiloff-Smith, A Functional Approach to Child Language:

     The definite article was used particularly to substantify pronouns, adjectives and adverbs, but appears always to have retained the quality of a demonstrative.

   • 1991, The New Orleans Review - Volume 18, page 71:

     Greimas narrates this process of producing meaning by describing the tendency of discourse to "substantify" relationships so that "whenever one opens one's mouth to speak of relationships, they transform themselves, as if by magic, into substantives.

   • 2013, D. Fisette, Husserl's Logical Investigations Reconsidered, page 190:

     Note also that we can always use nominalization to substantify an insubstantial object. If we apply this procedure to the substrate/determination distinction, we find that a substrate may be the substantialization of a property, as in the classic shifts from “white” to “whiteness” or from “beautiful” to “beauty”.