 For the next few paragraphs, we shall take semantic interpretation to refer to the process of deriving meaning representations from a word stream, taking for granted the operation of a prior or concurrent parsing phase. In other words, we are mapping syntactic trees to logical forms (or whatever our meaning representation may be). Thus, unlike interpretation in the sense of assigning external denotations to symbols, this is a form of “syntactic semantics” (Rapaport 1995).