 Syntactic tags represent the grammatical properties of the word under analysis, while the items in subscript are picked from a core set of perceptually grounded primitives (e.g., event, state, thing, path, place, property, amount) which are assumed to be innate, cross-modal and universal categories of the human mind. The decompositional machinery of Conceptual Semantics has a number of attractive features. Most notably, its representations take into account grammatical class and word-level syntax, which are plausibly an integral aspect of our knowledge of the meaning of words. However, some of its claims about the interplay between language and conceptual structure appear more problematic. To begin with, it has been observed that speakers tend to use causative predicates (e.g., ‘drink’) and the paraphrases expressing their decompositional structure (e.g., “cause a liquid to go into someone or something’s mouth”) in different and sometimes non-interchangeable ways (e.g., Wolff 2003), which raises concerns about the hypothesis that decompositional analyses à la Jackendoff may be regarded as faithful representations of word meanings. In addition, Conceptual Semantics is somewhat unclear as to what exact method should be followed in the identification of the motor-perceptual primitives that can feed descriptions of word meanings (Pulman 2005). Finally, the restriction placed by Conceptual Semantics on the type of conceptual material that can inform definitions of word meaning (low-level primitives grounded in perceptual knowledge and motor schemas) appears to affect the explanatory power of the framework. For example, how can one account for the difference in meaning between ‘jog’ and ‘run’ without ut taking into account higher-level, arguably non-perceptual knowledge about the social characteristics of jogging, which typically implies a certain leisure setting, the intention to contribute to physical wellbeing, and so on? See Taylor (1996), Deane (1996).