Alice, in this book unmistakably written by a professor of logic, is talking to a gnat (as you do, in Wonderland).

“ – then you don’t like all insects?” the Gnat went on …

I like them when they can talk,” Alice said. “None of them ever talk, where I come from.”

“What sorts of insects do you rejoice in, where you come from?” the Gnat inquired.

“I don’t rejoice in insects at all,” Alice explained, “because I am rather afraid of them – at least the large kinds. But I can tell you the names of some of them.”

“Of course, they answer to their names?” the Gnat remarked carelessly.

“I never knew them to do it.”

“What’s the use of their having names,” the Gnat said, “if they won’t answer to them?”⁴²

In Alice’s journeys into enchantment,^§MS3.1.1b all kinds of things answer to their names. So today do many other things, though not yet insects.

---

⁴² Lewis Carroll, 1872 [2000], The Annotated Alice: Through the Looking Glass, edited by M. Gardner, New York, NY: W.W. Norton, p. 173.

---

Cope, Bill, and Mary Kalantzis. 2020. Making Sense: Reference, Agency and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, p. 96. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316459645

Lewis Carroll’s "Alice" §MS1.1.1h