Making it Articulated JASON STANLEY Abstract: I argue in favor of the view that all the constituents of the propositions hearers would intuitively believe to be expressed by utterances are the result of assigning values to the elements of the sentence uttered, and combining them in accord with its structure. The way I accomplish this is by questioning the existence of some of the processes that theorists have claimed underlie the provision of constituents to the propositions recovered by hearers in linguistic interpretation, processes that apparently bypass assigning these constituents to elements of the logical form of the expression uttered. Here is the view of linguistic communication I find plausible. First, a speaker makes an utterance, and her linguistic intentions uniquely determine a certain syntactic structure, or ‘logical form’, as it is known in syntax. If her utterance is a successful linguistic assertion, the logical form is sentential. Successful interpretation involves assigning denotations to the constituents of the logical form, and combining them in accord with composition rules that do not vary with extra-linguistic context. The denotations that successful interpreters will assign to constituents of a logical form will be constrained by the linguistic conventions governing those elements. In the case of certain elements, which This paper originated as a reply to Robyn Carston, initially at the Mind & Language conference on pragmatics and cognitive science in Oxford, and then subsequently at the Eastern Division APA. My two greatest debts are to Robyn and to Kent Bach. My interactions with Robyn have taught me a great deal about the motivations and details of the relevance-theoretic perspective, and just a great deal about pragmatics generally. I have been discussing the arguments of this paper at length with Kent for many months, and his numerous e-mails and comments have greatly improved them. The audience at the Mind & Language conference was also tremendously helpful; in particular, Francois Recanati, Dan Sperber, Rob Stainton, and Deirdre Wilson all made incredibly valuable contributions to my greater edification, and hence to the final result of this paper. Conversations and e-mail with Michael Nelson also were very helpful. Richard Heck and Brett Sherman have been urging me for about a year and a half to take more seriously the over-generation worry facing my opponents. In the end, I recognized they were correct, though I have developed this worry differently than they would. So I owe them a significant debt of gratitude. I have talked over every line of this paper with Jeff King, and he has provided his usual extraordinarily useful suggestions. In addition, discussions with Richard Breheny, Delia Graff, Ernie Lepore, Peter Ludlow, Stephen Neale, Zoltan Gendler Szabo, and Rich Thomason have had substantial positive effect on the final result. Finally, comments by two anonymous referees (and editorial advice by Robyn) resulted in large-scale improvements. Address for correspondence: Dept. of Philosophy, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Ann Arbor, MI 48109–1003, USA. Email: jasoncsumich.edu Mind & Language, Vol. 17 Nos 1 and 2 February/April 2002, pp. 149–168.  Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2002, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford, OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.