The Meaning of Words

The linguistic meanings of the individual words somehow conspire with each other in virtue of their syntactic arrangement to create these structured meanings. Now exactly what somebody manages to state with a sentence with a particular meaning is something that goes beyond this. So there's a case where the sentence itself take anything you like as a clear meaning but you're imposing some constraints on how far that stretch is. What makes it the case that you've got the right constraints? The ones the speaker intended, more or less.