Let me start by thanking Professors Santorio and Szabo for their insightful comments and careful readings of Conjoining Meanings (CM). They highlight the main theses and describe the project in helpful ways.1 So instead of multiplying summaries, let me say a little about what motivated the project. Chomsky was influential. But teaching truth-theoretic semantics, for many years, really convinced me of the need for a different conception of linguistic meaning. Fido barked. Fido chased Felix. Names like ‘Fido’ and ‘Felix’ are said to be entity denoters of a basic semantic type <e>, and declarative sentences are said to be truth-value denoters of another basic type <t>. The idea is that ‘Fido’ and ‘Felix’ denote ordinary entities, perhaps a certain dog and a certain cat, while sentences denote truth or falsity.2 The tensed verb in (1) is then described as an expression—of a non-basic type <e, t>—that denotes a function that maps each entity to truth or falsity depending on whether or not that entity barked. The phrase ‘chased Felix’ is said to be an expression of the same type, corresponding to a function that maps each entity to truth or falsity depending on whether or not that entity chased Felix; and then ‘chased’ is said to be an expression—of the non-basic type <e, <e, t>>—that denotes a dyadic function that maps each entity, x, to a function that maps each entity, x', to truth or falsity depending on whether or not x' chased x. Every dog barked. The quantificational phrase ‘every dog’ gets described as an instance of type <<e, t>, t> that denotes a second-order function that maps each first-order function, F', of type <e, t> to truth or falsity depending on whether or not F' maps every dog to truth. Then ‘every’ is described as an expression of type <<e, t>, <<e, t>, t>> that denotes a dyadic second-order function that maps each function, F, of type <e, t> to a function of type <<e, t>, t> that maps each function, F', of type <e, t> to truth or falsity depending on whether or not every thing that F maps to truth is such that F' also maps that thing to truth.3 From here on, things get less pretty. Fido chased every cat. Fido barked loudly today. Felix heard Fido bark. Fido chased a cat. Dogs chased cats. Felix broke a vase, and so a vase broke. Felix chased a mouse, and so a mouse was chased by Felix. Hubbard gave Fido a bone. As the twists unfold, the value of appealing to Function Application becomes less and less clear, in part because the corresponding hierarchy of types—<e>, <t>, and <α, β> if <α> and <β> are types—seems so needlessly vast and powerful. Moreover, a different picture of composition begins to emerge, at least if one squints a bit; and given this picture, developed in CM, one need not adopt the hypothesis that ordinary sentences like (1-11) have truth conditions. At which point, it seems unreasonable to keep setting aside arguments against this hypothesis. In the book, I try to spell this out in detail. Here, let me just indicate the motivating line of thought. One can maintain that in (4), ‘every cat’ is of type <<e, t>, t> by treating ‘Fido chased’ as a device for mapping each entity to truth if and only if Fido chased it. The idea is that ‘every cat’ combines with an analog of the relative clause ‘which Fido chased’, which can be treated as an expression of type <e, t> formed by abstracting ‘which’ from the direct object position of ‘chased’; see, e.g., Heim and Kratzer (1998). This highlights the question, discussed in CM, of why ‘every cat which Fido chased’ cannot be understood as a sentence that is true if and only if every cat is such that Fido chased it. But even if there is a good answer, the meanings of (4) and ‘which Fido chased’ are not determined solely by Function Application. One way or another, neo-Fregean accounts of relative clauses and quantificational direct objects invoke a (syncategorematic) rule that permits conversion of an open sentence of type <t> into a predicate of type <e, t>. Not that there's anything wrong with that. I posit an analogous rule in CM. I also review the reasons for positing a conjunctive rule of composition for phrases formed by combining nouns or verbs with modifiers, as in ‘grey cat (which/that) Fido chased’ and ‘dog that barked loudly today’. It has also become common to posit existential closures of predicates, as suggested by Davidson (1967b) and many others. Function Application is not the only rule invoked these days. So we can ask if it should be invoked at all, given event analyses. The idea that ‘barked’ is of type <e, t> often gets modified in favor of saying that the intransitive verb is a semantically dyadic expression—of type <e, <e, t>>—that corresponds to a function that maps each entity, x, to a function that maps each event, x', to truth or falsity depending on whether or not x' was a barking by x. In which case, combining the verb with ‘Fido’ yields an expression corresponding to a function that maps events to truth values. This permits conjunctive composition with other such functions, like those corresponding to ‘loudly’ and ‘today’. But to get a plausible truth condition for (5), existential closure is needed. Moreover, ‘Fido bark’ appears as the direct object of ‘heard’ in (6), which means roughly that Felix heard an event of Fido barking. So it seems that covert existential closure can be triggered by combining a verb with an untensed clause, and without yielding a truth-evaluable sentence; see Higginbotham (1983). There are good reasons for also positing such closure for the noun in (7), as suggested by Kamp (1981) and Heim (1982). The indefinite article ‘a’ is plausibly an English grammatical marker of the singular count noun, as opposed to a quantifier of type <<e, t>, <<e, t>, t>> that needs to combine with ‘cat’ and then ‘Fido chased’. Discussions of causative and passive constructions, as in (9) and (10), play a large role in the relevant literature because such constructions invite a cluster of related questions. Why does the first conjunct of (9) imply the second? Why does each conjunct of (10) imply the other? And why is the subject of a transitive verb so often associated with being the agent or experiencer of an event, as opposed to being the patient or theme? If the verb in the first conjunct of (9) denotes the triadic function λx.λx'.λe.BreakByOf(e, x', x), then why are there no corresponding verbs in other Slangs that denote the “thematically inverted” function λx.λx'.λe.BreakOfBy(e, x', x)? In many Slangs, causative verbs are formed by adding an overt morpheme to intransitive verbs. Studies of this phenomenon revitalized the old idea that a clause like ‘Felix break a vase’ includes two verbal elements that have combined; see Baker (1988) on incorporation. On this view, the atomic verb 'break' takes a single argument that corresponds to the things that break in events of breaking, and agent positions are associated with a covert morpheme akin to the light verb ‘make’ in ‘make a baby smile’. In which case, the subject and object of ‘Felix break a vase’ are understood as parts of conjoinable event predicates like ‘∃x[AgentOf(e, x) & Felix(x)]’ and ‘TerminatesIn(e, f) & ∃x[BreakOf(f, x) & Vase(x)]’. If ‘Felix’ is understood this way in (9), it is unsurprising if ‘Felix’ is understood the same way in the prepositional phrase in (10). The indirect object of (11) can also be treated like the prepositional phrase in ‘Hubbard gave a bone to Fido’, especially in light of Larson's (1988, 2014) discussion of ditransitive constructions. Given evidence that these ideas are on the right track, semanticists should at least consider the possibility that while Slang lexical items can be semantically dyadic, polyadicity is unattested—or at least rare—because the operative compositional principles for phrasal syntax are geared to monadic predicates, and relationality is introduced via semantically dyadic lexical items that immediately combine with grammatical arguments (whose positions get existentially closed) to form monadic predicates that can be conjoined with others. CM explores this possibility from both formal and cognitive perspectives. On the technical front, I show how this typologically spare conception of meaning can handle the standard textbook constructions and more, without appeal to Function Application. This homework exercise doesn't show that the proposal is correct. But advocates of more familiar views are equally in the position of having a proposal that is not the only game in town. So arguments against appeal to Function Application and Fregean typology should be considered without prejudice. I suspect that when people talk about how impressive standard theories of meaning are, they are often thinking about the framework they were initially offered for sentences like (1-3)—while forgetting or downplaying the ways in which that framework creaks, under the pressure of constructions that get considered later—and not considering alternative models of composition. So I offered a specific alternative that can be modified in various ways. The bone is between Fido and Felix. The bone twixts Fido Felix. Taken together, these considerations highlight the questions of whether appeals to Function Application are needed or wanted in theories of meaning for Slangs—and if not, whether we should maintain the assumption that sentences like (1-12) have truth conditions. In my replies to Santorio and Szabo, I'll focus more on my general skepticism about attempts to characterize meaning in terms of truth. But I suspect that characterizing truth, even for the restricted range of thoughts that are naturally available to members of our species, will require appeal to many polyadic notions. (Modern logic is, for good reason, deeply relational.) In this sense, my spare conception of natural semantic composition is interwoven with my internalist conception of Slang meanings as instructions for how to assemble concepts of a limited sort.5 Davidsonians, who also eschew appeal to Function Application, may feel unfairly left out of the discussion so far. But as I try to show in CM, the empirical issues—concerning human cognition and semantic composition in Slangs—remain largely the same if talk of verbs denoting (potentially polyadic) functions is replaced with talk of verbs being satisfied by sequences of entities. And with few exceptions (e.g., Larson and Segal 1995), textbook details tend to look more like Lewis (1970) or Montague (1974) than Davidson (1967a) or Tarski (1944). That said, let me end this introduction with an opinionated reminder about the field's history. Current theories of linguistic meaning descend from Davidson and Lewis, whose proposals emerged in an environment of “Semantic Quineanism”: a form of extensionalism that was motivated by an odd mix—prevalent at Harvard in the 1960s—of externalism, a kind of nominalism, residual behaviorism that often morphed into instrumentalism about psychology, admiration of Tarski combined with a fondness for eliminativism with regard to meanings, and a tendency to treat regimentation as description. Theories born in this setting may need revision.