The following passage is from An Introduction to Logic (pp 140-2) by the Oxford logician H.W.B. Joseph, where he explains the origin, as he sees it, of the scholastic distinction between connotative and non-connotatave terms. He says that the distinction is found in Ockham, and he characterises it in two ways.

1. A term is connotative when we can suppose that it does not apply to the individual thing that in fact it does apply to. We can suppose that this piece of paper, though white, could have been a different colour, and so its whiteness is not a necessary part of my notion of the paper. 'White' is therefore connotative: it denotes two things, white paper, primarily, being white, secondarily. By contrast, given that John is a man, we cannot abstract being a man from him, or he disappears too. Thus 'man' is not connotative. It denotes only John, Jim, Joseph &c.

2. A connotative term is either adjectival, or a relational word like 'father', or a noun from which an adjective can be formed like 'pedant' (for example, pedant – pedantic, circle – circular, englishman – english).

Neither of these definitions appears explicitly in the passages of Ockham that he mentions, from chapter 10 of part I of the Summa Logicae (all quotations from which he apparently took from a secondary source, Geschichte der Logik by the German historian Carl Prantl). Ockham does not say that what is signified by a non-connotative term is logically or psychologically inseparable from the subject of which it is truly predicated. Nor does he say that connotative terms are essentially adjectival in meaning. (He considers 'body' to be a connotative name, for example).

This may have influenced Prior, who frequently refers to Joseph's writing. Prior says (The Doctrine of Propositions and Terms, p. 57, that and adjective is never, in its meaning, complete in itself - there is always an implied reference to something qualified, and mentions the medieval distinction between 'absolute' and 'connotative' term. Again, this is not entirely accurate. Ockham considers 'body' to be connotative.

The comment that Mill misunderstood the scholastic distinction is not entirely fair. See here.

For the sake of the curious, a few words many be added on the history of the term 'connotative'. In William of Occam a distinction is found between absolute and connotative terms. Absolute terms have not different primary and secondary significations; 'nomen autem connotativum est illud, quod significat aliquid primario et aliquid secundario'. He gives as instances relative names (for father signifies a man, and a certain relation between him and another): names expressing quantity (since there must be something which has the quantity): and certain other words: v. Prantl, Geschichte der Logik, Abs. xix. Anm. 831, vol. iii. p. 364. Johannes Buridanus said that some terms connote nothing beyond what they stand for ('nihil connotantes ultra ea, pro quibus supponunt'); but 'omnis terminus connotans aliud ab eo, pro quo supponit, dicitur appellativus et appellat illud quod connotat per modum adiacentis ei, pro quo supponit'. [N1] Thus meus and teus stand for something which is mine or yours; but they connote or signify further and 'appellant me et te tanquam adiacentes' (id. ib. xx. 111, vol iv. p.30). In the same way elsewhere we are told that 'rationale' 'connotat formam substantialem hominis' (xx. 232, vol. iv. p. 63: cf. Anm. 459, p. 109). Album and agens are given elsewhere by Occam (ib. xix. 917, vol. iii. p.386) as examples respectively of connotative and relative terms; and it is explained (ib. Anm. 918) that a connotative or relative term is one which cannot be defined without reference to one thing primarily and secondarily another; thus the meaning of album is expressed by 'aliquid habens albedinem'; and when by any term anything 'connotatur vel consignificatur, pro quo tamen talis terminus supponere non potest, quid de tali non verificatur [N2]' such a term is connotative or relative. Thus a term was called connotative if it stood for ('supponit pro') one thing, but signified as well ('connotat') something else about it; as Archbishop Whately says (Logic II. c. v. ~1, ed. 9, p. 122), ['it "connotes", i.e. "notes along with" the object [or implies], something considered as its attribute therein'. The Archbishop suggests the term attributive as its equivalent; and though connotative terms were not all of them adjectives, since relative terms also connote, and so do terms like 'mischief-maker' or 'pedant', which though adjectival in meaning are substantives in form, yet adjectives are the principal class of connotative terms, in the original sense of that word.

Connotation and denotation were thus originally not opposed to each other, and the terms were by no means equivalent (as they have come to be treated as being) to intension and extension. And James Mill, who probably by his remarks upon the word connote had some influence in directing his son's attention to it, says that 'white', in the phrase white horse, denotes two things, the colour, and the horse; but it denotes the colour primarily, the horse secondarily. We shall find it very convenient to say, therefore, that it notes the primary, connotes the secondary, signification'. (Analysis of the Human Mind, vol. i. p. 34.) By the schoolmen it would commonly have been said to connote the colour, and the primary signification was that 'pro quo supponit'. J.S. Mill, in a note to p.299 of the same volume, objects to his father's inversion of the usage. But he himself, by extending the term connotative to cover what the schoolmen called absolute, and opposed to connotative, names, introduced a complete alteration into its meaning.

John and man are both absolute names in Occam's sense. Man, no doubt, according to some (though not according to a nominalist like Occam) may stand for either an individual or an universal; for an individual when I say 'this man', for an universal or species when I say that man is mortal. (Occam would have said that in the latter case it stood for all the individuals). But even when I say 'this man', meaning John, the name man does not denote two things, man and John; for John is a man; and if I abstract from that, John disappears too; I have no notion of John as something with which I can proceed to combine in thought another thing, viz. man. With white it is different; I have a notion of paper, and a notion of whiteness, and whiteness is no necessary part of my notion of paper; and so with any other subject of which whiteness is only an attribute and not the essence. Hence the name white may be said to denote two things, the colour, and that which is so coloured; for these can be conceived each without the other, as John and man cannot. James Mill, who thought that objects were 'clusters of ideas', and that we gave names sometimes to clusters (in which case the names were concrete) and sometimes to a particular idea out of a cluster (in which case they were abstract), could also say that white, when predicated of this paper, denoted two things – the whiteness, and the cluster not including whiteness which I call paper. But John only denotes one thing – the cluster of ideas which make John; and man only one thing, the cluster of ideas common to John and Peter. J.S. Mill, however, distinguished what is common to John and Peter from John or Peter, and said not indeed that man denoted two things, but that it denoted one and connoted the other. But if he had been asked what John, the subject, was as distinct from man, his attribute, he would either have had to say that he was not something different from man, any more than slowness is something different from a fault, though fault was also held by him to denote one thing and to connote another; or that John was just the uncharacterised substance, in which those attributes inhered, the unknown subject; or else that he was what remained of the concrete individual when his humanity had been left out of his nature. None of these answers would be very satisfactory. Again, coloured is connotative, in the original meaning of that word, because it is predicable, say of a horse, and to be a horse is something else than to be coloured; in J.S. Mill's usage, because it is predicable of brown, though to be brown is to be coloured. Mill treats as two, when he opposes a term's denotation to its connotation, things like John and man, brown and colour, whereof the latter is simply the universal realised in the former, and the former nothing without the latter: as well as things like horse and colour, which are conceptually two. Originally, only a name that was predicated of something thus conceptually a distinct thing from the attribute implied by predicating it was called connotative; and it is only where there are thus conceptually two things, together indicated by the name, that the word connotative has any appropriateness.

(Cf. also on the history of the word Connotative a note in Minto's Logic, p.46).

[N2] Occam means that, e.g. snow can be referred to as album, but not as albedo.

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