sentential

Sentential is an adjective derived from the Latin word sententia meaning "opinion" or "sentence." In linguistics and logic, it refers to matters pertaining to sentences or the sentence level, as opposed to words, morphemes, or larger discourse units. The term is used to describe phenomena that operate on entire sentences or clauses functioning as sentences.

In linguistics, sentential terms describe elements related to sentences. For example, sentential adverbs (also called sentence adverbs) such as frankly, fortunately, and apparently modify the entire proposition rather than a single constituent. Sentential negation refers to negation that applies to the whole sentence. Sentential complement clauses are subordinate clauses that act as the content of a verb, adjective, or noun, as in "She believes that the train is late" where the clause "that the train is late" functions as the sentential complement.

In logic and philosophy, sentential logic (also known as propositional logic) treats sentences as the basic units called propositions. Complex sentences are built from propositional variables using connectives such as and, or, not, and implies. The term "sentential form" denotes any string of symbols constructed from sentence letters and connectives that could be turned into a sentence by assigning truth values to the letters.

The label "sentential" is most common in descriptions of general sentence-level phenomena; it is less often used for specific sub-structures within a sentence. It is distinct from terms that describe word-level phenomena (lexical) or structure above the sentence level (discourse).