Abstract
On the hypothesis that all natural or artificial languages of interest to us can be given transformational grammars of a certain not-very-special sort, it becomes possible to give very simple general answers to the questions:
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(1)
What sort of thing is a meaning?
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(2)
What is the form of the semantic rules whereby meanings of compounds are built up from the meanings of their constituent parts?
This paper is derived from a talk given at the Third La Jolla Conference on Linguistic Theory, March 1969. I am much indebted to Charles Chastain, Frank Heny, David Kaplan, George Lakoff, Richard Montague, and Barbara Partee for many valuable criticisms and suggestions.
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Lewis, D. (1972). General Semantics. In: Davidson, D., Harman, G. (eds) Semantics of Natural Language. Synthese Library, vol 40. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-2557-7_7
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