ABSTRACT
The proposition – or its equivalent in natural language, the sentences or clause 1 – has always been considered, whether on intuitive or formal grounds, the basic information-processing unit in human language. Words may have meaning, but only propositions carry information. Even when it appears, prima facia, that a single word bears information, on further inspection that word turns out to stand in for an entire proposition. For example, in (1) below the curt one-word response (1b) stands for the fuller proposition (1c):
Who killed the butler?
The maid.
The maid killed the butler.
