enunciati

Enunciati is the plural form of enunciato in Italian. In general usage, an enunciato denotes a statement or utterance—something that asserts a content about the world. In linguistic and philosophical contexts, the term emphasizes the propositional content of a sentence, rather than its syntactic form alone.

In language studies, an enunciato refers to an actual spoken or written instance, an utterance produced in communication, as opposed to the abstract sentence structure that underlies it. In logic and formal semantics, enunciati are treated as propositions or declarative sentences that can be assigned truth values, true or false. Complex enunciati are built from simpler ones using logical connectives, modalities or quantifiers.

Etymology-wise, enunciato comes from the Latin enuntiatum, related to enuntiare, meaning to declare or announce. In Italian academic prose, enunciato is common in linguistics, logic, philosophy of language and semantically oriented disciplines. It is often distinguished from related terms such as frase or proposizione, with enunciato carrying a stronger emphasis on propositional content and truth conditions.

Examples of enunciati include: “La terra gira intorno al sole.”, which is a straightforward declarative enunciato expressing a proposition; “Se piove, allora prendo l’ombrello.”, a conditional enunciato; and “Questo enunciato è vero” as a meta-statement about the truth of an enunciato. While in everyday speech people frequently use “frase” or “affermazione,” enunciato retains a more formal sense of a statement capable of being true or false within a given theory.