Full Idea
The puzzle is that once plausible assignments of semantic roles have been made to parts of sentences, the parts do not seem to compose a united whole.
Gist of Idea
If you assign semantics to sentence parts, the sentence fails to compose a whole
Source
Donald Davidson (Truth and Predication [2005], Intro)
Book Reference
Davidson,Donald: 'Truth and Predication' [Belknap Harvard 2005], p.4
A Reaction
It's not clear to me that a sentence does compose a 'whole', given that you can often add or remove bits from sentences, sometimes without changing the meaning. We often, in speech, assemble sentences before we have thought of their full meaning.