Penultimate draft ⋅ Forthcoming in Routledge Handbook of PropositionsPropositions are traditionally regarded as performing vital roles in theories of natural language, logic, and cognition. This chapter o ers an opinionated survey of recent literature to assess whether they are still needed to perform three linguistic roles: be the meaning of a declarative sentence in a context, be what is designated by certain linguistic expressions, and be the content of illocutionary acts. After considering many of the relevant theoretical choice-points, I suggest that there remains a linguistic basis for propositions, but not for some of the traditional reasons.1 A question to raise is whether we should be realists about propositions as unobserved entities. See Simchen (forthcoming) for a defense of instrumentalism about structured propositions, Armour-Garb and Woodbridge (2012) for a pretense-based ctionalism, and Ball and Rabern (2018, §1.2.2) for a survey of anti-realist attitudes towards meanings generally. In §3, I identify some initial problems with non-realist views.