One way in which the study of basic conceptual meaning might be helpful would be as a
means of accounting for the “oddness” we experience when we read sentences such as the
following:
▪ The hamburger ate the boy.
▪ The table listens to the radio.
▪ The horse is reading the newspaper.
We should first note that the oddness of these sentences does not derive from their
syntactic structure. According to the basic syntactic rules for forming English sentences, we
have well-formed structures.