ABSTRACT
We began this book with the question ‘What do we talk about?’ and in the ensuing chapters we explored many of the kinds of meaning that we communicate by means of language and how these meanings are structured into propositions and expressed grammatically by sentences. We have by and large — apart from in the previous chapter — restricted our consideration to single propositions, but we rarely communicate in single propositions, except for notices (‘Passengers must cross the line by the bridge’) and brief notes (‘Please leave one extra pint today’). Our communication is more usually in sequences of propositions. We will use the term message to refer to an act of communication (made up of one or more propositions) and the term text as its grammatical correlate.
