Self-modeling configurations that share a world must coordinate about what is the case. Where food is. Whether a partner is reliable. What threatens the group. What happened yesterday, what will likely happen tomorrow, what another mind is thinking. The content at stake is *propositional*: it has truth conditions, it can be confirmed or disconfirmed, and it persists across speakers such that those who were not there to witness what the proposition reports can still inherit it.

The structural account proposes that coordinated self-modeling systems may develop richer communication systems, including propositional transmission under some conditions. This is not a theorem that self-modeling and coordination always yield language, or that no other forms of communication can support coordination. The following features are proposed conditions for the book's model of propositional transmission, not universal predictions for every possible communicating system.

It must have *distinguishable signs*. Different meanings must be carried by different signals, because one signal carrying every meaning would carry no meaning at all. Distinction is Spatiality: signals must occupy different positions in the space of possible signals.

It must have *sequential ordering*. Meaning must unfold across a before and after, because simultaneous delivery of all signs is indistinguishable from silence. Order is Temporality: which sign comes first, second, third affects what is said.

It must have *causal transmission*. The signal must move from speaker to receiver through something that carries it without dissolving it. Transmission is Physicality: something persists from utterance to reception, or no reception occurs.

These three features are central to the framework's analysis of transmission, but they do not by themselves settle whether a system carries propositional content. Communicative systems can use sound, sign, gesture, chemical signal, or electrical pulse, and the status of bees, whales, non-human animals, and artificial systems as propositional communicators remains contested. The structural account offers a model of what would make transmission proposition-like; it does not resolve every empirical classification. The [§7.6](<7.6 Singularity.md>) cycle argument extends the reach conditionally: T, S, and Φ recur wherever the universe iterates, so wherever recurrence produces coordination-capable life under the relevant social and ecological pressures, propositional transmission will have to develop on the same three structural axes.

Grammar recapitulates the structure at the level of parts of speech. Nouns name what persists at a position — Physicality at Spatiality. Verbs name transitions — the motion of Temporality. Prepositions and case markers name the relations between positions — Spatiality and Temporality made explicit. Adjectives and adverbs modify what the noun and verb pick out. Every natural language ever documented has the category distinctions that map onto the structural conditions, because a language lacking those distinctions could not carry the content those conditions make possible.

Propositional content has two components the grammar of every natural language distinguishes. Both are needed; neither alone makes a proposition.

The first is *reference*. A proposition must point to what it is about. Nouns, pronouns, proper names, demonstratives, and definite descriptions all do reference: they identify an entity persisting in Spatiality that the claim is to be made *about*. Without reference, a predicate floats free and says nothing, because there is nothing for it to be true or false of.

The second is *predication*. A proposition must say something about what it refers to. Verbs, adjectives, and predicate constructions all do predication: they ascribe a feature, an action, a relation, a state. Without predication, a referring term is a label, not a claim. *The sky* says nothing. *Is blue* says nothing. *The sky is blue* is a proposition, because reference has been joined to predication and the joint construction now has truth conditions.

A proposition is the minimum unit of propositional content because it is the minimum combination of reference and predication that has truth conditions. Anything less cannot be true or false. Anything more is built out of propositions. This is not an incidental feature of how language happens to work. It is what propositional content structurally is, and any system that carries propositional content must have it.

The same structural requirement explains a cross-linguistic fact otherwise puzzling. No known human language lacks the noun/verb distinction, despite enormous variation in morphology, phonology, and surface syntax. Evans and Levinson (2009) argue that many alleged linguistic universals are softer than once claimed; the reference/predication distinction survives their scrutiny because it is not a contingent universal but what having propositional content consists in. Languages differ wildly in how they mark the distinction, in what else they encode, in how rigidly parts of speech are separated. But a language without any way to refer and any way to predicate could not carry propositions, and would not be a language.

Reference has one further structural feature every language must instantiate: it must include terms that point back to the occasion of utterance itself. The speaker, the hearer, the present moment, the shared surrounding space are not separately nameable the way ordinary referents are — they are where the utterance is coming from and going to, not what it is about. Deictic or indexical terms (*I*, *you*, *here*, *now*, *this*, *that*) fill this role, anchoring the transmission to the specific positions the two parties occupy. Without deictic reference, propositions could be transmitted but could not hook onto the occasion that produced them; with it, the abstract reference-predication system becomes usable by speakers and hearers at particular positions in T and S. Every natural language has a deictic system because every language is used by speakers and hearers who must refer back to themselves, each other, and the situation they share in order for propositions to land at all (Peirce 1931–1958; Bühler 1934; Kaplan 1989; Levinson 2004).

A simple case shows what deictic reference does by showing what fails when it cannot land. Imagine a slip of paper found decades later, reading *Meet me here tomorrow at noon.* The proposition is grammatically complete and lexically unambiguous; reference and predication are both performed. Yet the note as found cannot tell anyone what it once told its addressee — which speaker is *me*, which place is *here*, which day was *tomorrow*. Spoken face-to-face, the same words land effortlessly because the speaker, the location, and the day are all present at the occasion of saying. Deictic reference is what lets a proposition ride on the structural specificity of the T–S position the utterance occupies; strip the occasion away and the proposition keeps its form but loses its grip.

*A note on scope.* The three structural features predicted here — distinguishable signs, sequential ordering, causal transmission — together with the reference/predication minimum and the deictic anchor follow from what propositional transmission consists in given T, S, and Φ at the depth a self-modeling configuration reaches. They are predictions of the structural account in the identification sense flagged at the head of Chapter 8, not theorems derived from the proof of Chapters 1–2. The empirical record across cross-linguistic typology, non-human communicative systems, and spontaneous language genesis is surveyed at [§8.10.4](<8.10.4 What is Confirmed.md>); the rival accounts are taken up at [§8.10.5](<8.10.5 What is Concluded.md>).


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← [8.10.2 What is Required](<8.10.2 What is Required.md>) | [8.10.4 What is Confirmed](<8.10.4 What is Confirmed.md>) →
