Truth-conditional semantics

Robyn Carston
Table of contents

Truth-conditional semantics is a theory of the meaning of natural language sentences. It takes the language–world relation as the basic concern of semantics rather than the language–mind relation: language is about states of affairs in the world. The semantic competence of a speaker–hearer is said to consist in his/her knowledge, for any sentence of his/her language, of how the world would have to be for that sentence to be true.

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