Abstract

Sententialism: An adequate semantic theory for a language assigns semantic values to complex expressions (typically on the basis of the semantic values of the syntactic parts of those complex expressions), with the assignment process culminating in the assignment of appropriate semantic values (typically propositions or truth conditions) to entire sentences. Sententialism is so-called because it takes the task of semantic theory proper to be exhausted once semantic values have been assigned to full sentences. Beyond the sentence may lay further linguistic phenomena broadly construed, such as various discourse properties and relations, but any such phenomena are relegated to the pragmatics. Sententialism thus typically goes hand-in-hand with a larger philosophical perspective according..