Jackendoff´s Semantic Structures Manuel Bremer Ray Jackendoff has developed a semantic theory which claims to be the semantic format corresponding to Transformational Grammar. As the syntactic rules the rules of sematics are implicitly known, and the basic structures are innate. This innateness of basic structures guarantees intersubjective reference. Each speaker refers only to his or her projected world, not to an objective world. He or she does so by using conceptual structures, which might be projected as entities of various kinds. This conceptual structure is the same in cognitive capacities as vision and the use of language. Concerning human categorization Jackendoff argues against other theories of meaning, especially theories of truth conditions (§1). Furthermore the semantic structures should obey a grammaticality constraint which is violated by the predicate calculus (§2). The thematic relations hypothesis (§3) concerns the underlying structure of all sematic fields. §1 Human categorisation, features, and word meaning The problem of human categorisation concerns the human ability to subsume particulars under types. This subsumption is typically expressed by a predicative sentence "a is F". Categorisation is not restricted to humans. An animal can discriminate objects as belonging to the type of eatable things or as not eatable. Since the animal does not use human language categorisation does not dependent on human language. It involves cognitive capacities like vision. Although categorisation takes place not only in the use of language, the study of meaning will focus on categorisation by the use of meaningful symbols. The most general question concerning symbolic categorisation is: How do we understand atomic sentences? Seeing Lisa we have a representation of Lisa. If somebody says "Lisa is a cat" there has to be some fit between the representation of Lisa and the representation of what it is to be a cat, i.e. belong to the category cat. The category of cats is represented by our concept of cats. The sentence is the result of some cognitive operation of comparing two items of conceptual structure. Lisa is represented as an individual thing, i.e., by a [TOKEN] concept, and the category of cats by a [TYPE] concept 1 . Corresponding to the ontological categories of particulars, there are [THING TOKEN], [EVENT TOKEN], [PLACE TOKEN] etc. Accordingly there are [THING TYPE], [EVENT TYPE], [PLACE TYPE] etc. Resembling the predicate calculus a atomic sentence concerning the fact that the representation LISA of Lisa is classified as conforming to the conceptual structure CAT can now be represented as 1 ) Conceptual structures are indicated by the use of bold letters. The conceptual structures are universal. The naming of an universal conceptual structure by the name "GO" for example does not exclude to name it "GEHEN" in a German textbook. The named conceptual structure is the same feature, which is part of the meaning of verbs of motion in both languages respectively.