In general, this paper is a plea for naturalness in grammar, or, put differently, for the belief that (i) grammar cannot be studied in isolation from semantic, contextual, lexical, metaphorical, functional and stylistic considerations, (ii) synchronic work cannot ignore diachronic, crosslinguistic and acquisitional phenomena, (iii) linguistics cannot study formal universals to the exclusion of substantive universals. In particular, it is claimed that four (and perhaps more) strata can be distinguishedin the semantic representation of any simple sentence: the performative stratum, the tense-aspect-modality stratum, the existential stratum and the objective content stratum.