On this aspect of Coleridge’s work, the excerpts from unpublished manuscripts given by A. D. Snyder in Coleridge on Logic and Learning are useful and some items in Anima Poetae. Dr. I. A. Richards in Coleridge on Imagination stresses the importance of Coleridge as ‘the first semasiologist’, and there is an essay by J. Isaacs on ‘Coleridge’s Critical Terminology’ in Essays and Studies by Members of the English Association, Vol. XXI.
He was not deeply interested in philology and, in fact, his derivations are sometimes so wild as to make one suspect that he approached it in the spirit of fantasy, or at any rate with a pretty light heart. But he was deeply interested in the philosophical implications of language, and sensitive to problems of communication. He was aware of the difference between assertive and emotive power in words, of shades of meaning and the subtleties of context. He could be casual about grammar in the interests of meaning. And his own involved hyper-parenthetical style is the vice of these virtues.