M. attacks the view that sentences are abstract formal objects, which he claims to be present not only in Chomskyan linguistics but also in generative semantics and some of the work by the Prague functionalists and by Halliday. The alternative he proposes is a view of a sentence as an event, an act or a sequence of related acts, in which intentions play a crucial role. In his discussion, M. refers in particular to problems arising in connection with relative clauses and definite descriptions.