  So the sentence “The cow is in the garden” does not just mean the list &lt;cow, being in the garden&gt;, as it would if each word simply designated an object, but rather the connected proposition &lt;cow-which-is in-the-garden&gt;. The idea, in effect, is that all meaning-relata, are, in Frege’s terminology, ‘unsaturated’. To this ingenious suggestion, The Manual of Reason replies (TSD 66k) that it is superfluous, for “since it is possible for the relation [between meaning-relata] to be apprehended as what is signified by the sentence [as a whole], it is not necessary to postulate a semantic power with reference to the relation”. In other words, The Manual of Reason claims that general (presumably syntactic) features of the sentence are enough to connect the meaning-relata, without needing to claim that those meaning-relata themselves do the connecting.