On the Semantical Interpretation of Linguistic Entities That Function Structurally*

THIS section of the paper describes a general method, which applies the techniques of modern symbolic logic, for giving a semantical interpretation to those entities of natural language systems that function in a structural capacity. Such entities do not perform the task of denoting the individuals, properties and relations of those individuals a language talks about; they are linguistic devices that serve to combine the denotative terms into meaningful utterances. They function in many ways, such as to express syntactic relations and to express generality. Words like "each", "all", "either-or", "any", "ago" are a few examples of terms that belong in this category. Because they are the analogues in the natural language systems of logical constants in the symbolic language systems, the author has chosen to call them "structural constants". This grammatical category was first defined by H. Reichenbach in his book Elements of Symbolic Logic where he pointed out the necessity of distinguishing terms that function logically from those that function denotatively.*/. The kind of definition required for giving an interpretation of these linguistic entities differs radically from the kind of definition found