Theodes of semantic interpretation which wish to capture as many generalizations as possible must face up to the manifoldly ambiguous and contextually dependent nature of word meaning? In this paper I present a two-level scheme of semantic interpretation in which the first level deals with the semantic consequences of'syntactic structure and the second with the choice of word meaning. On the first level the meanings of ambiguous words, pronominal references, nominal compounds and metonomies are not treated as fixed, but are instead represented by free variables which range over predicates and functions. .
