6. Sentence Interpretation
Like words, sentences carry meaning. The meaning of most words is conventional, derived from arbitrary pairings between from and meaning. Speakers recognize the meaning of words in a language when they know such conventional and arbitrary mappings of from and meaning. On the other hand, determining the meaning of a sentence is not that straightforward. Since the number of sentences is unlimited, their meanings cannot be all listed in speakers’ lexicon, and thus it is impossible to learn the meanings of all sentences by memorization.