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The second part of Frege's famous essay "Über Sinn und Bedeutung' is longer than the first, but it has received far less attention in the literature. On 14 pages Frege tries to determine the semantic roles of various kinds of subordinate clauses. He devotes special attention to those clauses that occur in reports of speech acts and in reports of propositional mental acts-or-states ("attitudes'). He calls them "abstract noun-clauses' and contends that they designate propositions. In the class="EmphasisTypeItalic ">first section of this paper I scrutinize the way Frege contrasts both Oratio obliqua and Oratio recta with what he calls "normal' speech, distinguish between concept and test of "normality' and complain about the widespread misuse of Frege's terminology by some heroes of analytical philosophy and by some of his translators. In the second section I distinguish that-clauses as diaphanous designators from other designators of propositions. In the third section I try to defend Frege's contention about that-clauses in Oratio obliqua against arguments from lack of substitutivity that in recent years have become increasingly popular. I argue, as against Dummett, that it is important to treat propositions as contents rather than as (intentional) objects of acts or states of ϕ-ing that things are thus and so. Frege refrains from treating that-clauses as designators of propositions whenever they are used in alethic discourse like "It is true that p'.

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