 There are a wide variety of approaches to natural language semantics. My strategy in what follows will be to begin by explaining one prominent family of approaches to semantics which developed over the course of the twentieth century and is still prominently represented in contemporary work in semantics, both in linguistics and in philosophy. For lack of a better term, let's call these types of semantic theories classical semantic theories. (As in discussions of classical logic, the appellation “classical” is not meant to suggest that theories to which this label is applied are to be preferred over others.) Classical semantic theories agree that sentences are (typically) true or false, and that whether they are true or false depends on what information they encode or express. This “information” is often called “the proposition expressed by the sentence”. The job of a semantic theory, according to the classical theorist, is at least in large part to explain how the meanings of the parts of the sentence, along with the context in which the sentence is used, combine to determine which proposition the sentence expresses in that context (and hence also the truth conditions of the sentence, as used in that context).