This chapter provides the compositional details, showing how lexical meanings can be combined (via relatively simple operations) to form complex meanings, and how executing these meanings/instructions can yield conjunctive concepts whose atomic constituents are monadic or dyadic. After introducing some assumptions about the syntactic structures that connect meanings with pronunciations, the discussion turns to simple examples like combining ‘cow’ with a plural morpheme, and work up to untensed clauses like the complement of ‘saw’ in ‘saw a dog chase cows’. The next step is to accommodate tensed constructions, matrix sentences, indices, relative clauses, and examples involving sentential negation. A key idea, borrowed from Tarski, is that sentential expressions can be viewed as predicates of a special sort (rather than denoters of truth values). Finally, it is argued that not only can this proposal handle quantificational constructions, it yields an account that is preferable to more familiar accounts that employ Fregean typology.
Minimal semantic instructions
