The problem I have always had with possible world semantics is that it blurs the line between possibility and actuality (or as NK put it, between abstraction and truth (but this is by no means the same distinction).  Our conceptions of language are thus limited to representation and we forget that the meaningful is much broader than the true.  

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Your comments on abstraction relate to the origin of language and the “insight” that language begins with representation, or as Wittgenstein saw it, language cannot begin with lying.

But to follow-up with the Wittgenstein theme, language does not begin with representation – it cannot because if it did it would presume the “thought” that we are aware of something and then choose to re-present it and that is to assume (as Jerry Fodor did) that there is a language of thought which precedes language.  But that does not answer the question, rather it is a confused shifting of the problem back a level.

The way we are in the world is not the way a match is in a matchbox and likewise language is not a mere compendium of words that go proxy for things or sentences whose only value is determined by truth or assertibility conditions.  I am now off to read some poetry.

P.S. I too found Peter T. Cash’s comments amusing and also interesting.