[Lingtyp] What is propositional content?

[stef.spronck at helsinki.fi]

Dear Vladimir,
 
Thank you for raising this question, I think your observation is exactly right and similarly applies to notions like 'scope', 'sentence', or even many examples of grammatical categories.
 
The most serious attempt at placing 'proposition' within a framework for typological description I know is Amsterdam Functional Grammar and its current incarnation of Functional Discourse Grammmar, which at least prompts you to find language-internal arguments for calling a unit a proposition (or assign it to some other semantic/structural level). Will be happy to send more specific references if this sounds like what you are after.
 
The bigger issue for why these situations continue to arise, I'd say, is because much of the time in descriptive linguistics and typology we either hope that the reader will have an adequate theory for the respective term (or be content to believe that the author has one), we believe that developing careful methodological solutions to theoretical questions is sufficient, or simply ignore the situation (I am not sure if this is a bigger sin than ignoring data to accommodate your theory, but I'd still say it is one).
 
Best,
Stef
 
---
Dr. Stef Spronck,
Lecturer in Communication, Argumentation & Rhetoric at the University of Amsterdam,
Research affiliate in Indigenous studies and dosentti https://dosenttiliitto.fi/lisatietoa.html in General linguistics at the University of Helsinki,https://participationgrammar.net/

> On 25/10/2025 02:59 CEST Vladimir Panov via Lingtyp <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org> wrote:
>  
>  
> Dear typologists,
>  
> In various traditions of linguistics, both "formal" and "functional", there is a habit to speak of "propositional content". I have a feeling that this term is very difficult to define, especially if one takes cross-linguistic variation seriously. In practice, many linguistis tend to use the term as if the reader knew exactly what it means. Needles to say, the term has a long and complex history.
>  
> Are you aware of any relatively up-to-date and possibly typllogy-friendly literature which discusses this problem?
>  
> Thank you,
> Vladimir
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