ABSTRACT
What questions should a theory of word meaning attempt to answer? A traditional requirement is that, given the lexicon of some natural language, it should show how the semantic combination rules of the language operate with the lexicon in such a way that the following pairs of sentences are shown to be related to each other by entailment:
(I) a Joe persuaded Jim to leave b Jim intends to leave
(2) a Joe persuaded Jim that the earth was flat b Jim believes that the earth is flat
(3) a Tiddles is a cat b Tiddles is an animal
(4) a I have a toothache b I have a pain
(5) a Bill had a nightmare b Bill had a dream
(6) a The brick is red b The brick is coloured
In what follows, we shall have nothing further to say about the details of such a combinatorial mechanism, but will assume that once given the system of semantic relations existing between items in a lexicon, it is possible to construct one.
