In this chapter, we make the step from syntax to semantics - the study of meaning. The central question we're going to look at is the following: Given a sentence, how do we get to its meaning? And, being programmers, the next thing that interests us is: How can we automate this process? This is, we're going to look at the task of semantic or meaning construction . But don't be afraid, our work in the previous lectures wasn't for nothing. One of the first things we're going to see is that syntactic structure plays a crucial role in meaning construction.