satisfied by the meanings of the subject and complements of the verb's clause. For example, the meaning of the verb
likeincludes twovariables, the“liker”(an animate Object) and the thingliked (for now an Object, but we willbe more
general shortly). The general principles of linking (section 5.9) connect these two variables with subject and object
position in syntax respectively. Therefore, the lexical entry of like plus the linking rules can establish the
correspondence shown in (1) between phonological, syntactic, and conceptual structure. (We useLIKEto stand in for
the meaning of the verb, for the moment leaving further decomposition aside).^195
In(1)theopenvariablesare notatedinitalics; these mustbesatisfiedin order tomake(i)intothestructureofan actual
sentence. Variablescome tobesatisfied bybeing unified withconstituentsoftheappropriate type—inthiscase NPs in
syntactic structure and Objects in conceptual structure. But in addition, (1) stipulates that the NP variables must be
linked with the Object variables. Hence they must be satisfied by linked constituents.
The simplest way to achieve such linking is through the lexicon, using proper names as syntactic arguments. The
proper namesBeethovenandSchubert, for instance, look like (2a, b).^196
PHRASAL SEMANTICS 379
(^195) The notation for indices shows its weakness here. The crucial factor is not what actual letters or numbers we use for indices, only which indices are the same and which
different. In this chapter I will simply number indices sequentially as I need them.
(^196) Persons,the prototypicalcase of proper names, are actually dot-objectsof thetypeObject•Mind, as argued in section11.10; we ignorethis importantdetail.In addition,as
argued in section 10.9, proper names include an indexical feature, whose role in phrasal semantics we take up in sections 12.3 and 12.4.