I saw a book on the table is a sentence.
Book on the table is not a sentence.
Proposition :Part of the meaning of the utterance of by declarative sentence that describes some state of affairs.
Example:
Take a look at this picture. You can describe this scene by:
A cat eats a mouse.
A mouse is eaten by a cat.
Those two different sentences belong to the same proposition. All those utterances can be analyzed as consisting of a predicate naming an event or state and on or arguments naming referents that participate in that event or state.
- The activity is eat
- The agent is cat
- The patient is mouse
Propositions, unlike sentences, cannot be said to belong to any particular language. Sentences in different languages correspond to the same proposition, if the two sentences are perfect translations of each other.
Look at this sentences:
I love you (English)
Aishiteru (Japanese)
Wo ai ni (Chinese)
We call them as different sentences and language, but they refer to the same proposition: I love you.
