This chapter focuses on Heidegger’s claim (chapter 2) that propositional content has a prepredicative foundation to assess the relationship between a phenomenological approach to language and standard semantics-based approaches that assume the primacy of propositional content. Having clarified the distinction between these two approaches and various possibilities for interpreting Heidegger’s claim, it argues against a weak foundation claim, according to which prepredicative factors do not affect the philosophical adequacy of the semantic notions of propositional and conceptual content, and instead defends a stronger claim – ‘moderate’ functional foundation – based on differences in the functioning of prepredicative factors and semantic properties. This claim is then situated in the context of a debate between Hubert Dreyfus and John McDowell about the role of concepts in prereflective intelligence, in which it offers a midway between their respective extremes of nonconceptual coping and pervasive conceptualism.