About this topic
Summary The principle of semantic compositionality (PC) says, in a standard formulation: "The meaning of a complex expression is a function of the meanings of its parts and its mode of composition." It is a guiding principle in most of formal semantics. In the philosophy of language, as well as in linguistics more generally, it is controversial. Some think it is trivially true, or even empirically empty. Others think it is false (e.g. because of quotation, or belief sentences, or idioms). Yet others think it is true, or approximately true, and that it has explanatory value. Intuitions anticipating (PC) were expressed already in medieval times, but it was not stated in its modern form until the early 1980s.
Key works Carnap's Meaning and Necessity contains approximate statements of (PC), under the heading 'Frege's Principle'. Richard Montague (Montague 1974) pioneered formal semantics, and compositionality was central to Montague's approach. It was stated by him as a required property of formal semantics.  Several of the early papers in  Davidson 1984, such as 'Truth and meaning', give argument why natural language must have a property like compositionality (although Davidson does not use the term). In 'Compositionality', included in Partee 2004, Barbara Partee was the first to state (PC) as a principle in the modern format.   Hodges 2001 provides an algebraic framework for compositionality different from Montague's, defines important concepts and proves fundamental theorems.
Introductions Szabó 2008; Pagin & Westerståhl 2010; Pagin & Westerståhl 2010.
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322 found
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  1. Against Semantic Relationism.Nathan Salmon - manuscript
    The theory that Kit Fine calls 'semantic relationism' replaces standard semantic compositionality with an alternative according to which statements of the form '... A … A ...’ and ‘... A … B ...’ (e.g., ‘Cicero admires Cicero’ and ‘Cicero admires Tully’) differ in semantic content—even where the two terms involved are exactly synonymous—simply in virtue of the recurrence that is present in the former statement and absent from the latter. A semantic-relationist alternative to standard compositionality was first explicitly proffered by (...)
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  2. Use, Compositionality and Prior's Puzzle.Simon Vonlanthen - manuscript
  3. Only and even: Sanctioning, compositionality, and variation in polarity. (Handout).Anastasia Giannakidou - manuscript
    This is my response as key discussant to papers presented at the workshop on Polarity at this year’s LSA meeting in Anaheim, CA.
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  4. Donkeys under Discussion.Lucas Champollion, Dylan Bumford & Robert Henderson - forthcoming - Semantics and Pragmatics.
    Donkey sentences have existential and universal readings, but they are not often perceived as ambiguous. We extend the pragmatic theory of nonmaximality in plural definites by Križ (2016) to explain how context disambiguates donkey sentences. We propose that the denotations of such sentences produce truth-value gaps — in certain scenarios the sentences are neither true nor false — and demonstrate that Križ’s pragmatic theory fills these gaps to generate the standard judgments of the literature. Building on Muskens’s (1996) Compositional Discourse (...)
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  5. Combinatoriality and Compositionality in Everyday Primate Skills.Nathalie Gontier - forthcoming - International Journal of Primatology.
    Human language, hominin tool production modes, and multimodal communications systems of primates and other animals are currently well-studied for how they display compositionality or combinatoriality. In all cases, the former is defined as a kind of hierarchical nesting and the latter as a lack thereof. In this article, I extend research on combinatoriality and compositionality further to investigations of everyday primate skills. Daily locomotion modes as well as behaviors associated with subsistence practices, hygiene, or body modification rely on the hierarchical (...)
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  6. Combinatoriality and Compositionality in Communication, Skills, Tool Use, and Language.Nathalie Gontier, Stefan Hartmann, Michael Pleyer & Daniela Rodrigues - forthcoming - International Journal of Primatology.
    Combinatorial behavior involves combining different elements into larger aggregates with meaning. It is generally contrasted with compositionality, which involves the combining of meaningful elements into larger constituents whose meaning is derived from its component parts. Combinatoriality is commonly considered a capacity found in primates and other animals, whereas compositionality often is considered uniquely human. Questioning the validity of this claim, this multidisciplinary special issue of the International Journal of Primatology unites papers that each study aspects of combinatoriality and compositionality found (...)
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  7. On the nature of the lexicon: the status of rich lexical meanings.Lotte Hogeweg & Agustin Vicente - forthcoming - Journal of Linguistics.
    The main goal of this paper is to show that there are many phenomena that pertain to the construction of truth-conditional compounds that follow characteristic patterns, and whose explanation requires appealing to knowledge structures organized in specific ways. We review a number of phenomena, ranging from non-homogenous modification and privative modification to polysemy and co-predication that indicate that knowledge structures do play a role in obtaining truth-conditions. After that, we show that several extant accounts that invoke rich lexical meanings to (...)
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  8. States of Affairs as Structured Extensions in Free Logic.Hans-Peter Leeb - forthcoming - Logic and Logical Philosophy:1.
    The search for the extensions of sentences can be guided by Frege’s “principle of compositionality of extension”, according to which the extension of a composed expression depends only on its logical form and the extensions of its parts capable of having extensions. By means of this principle, a strict criterion for the admissibility of objects as extensions of sentences can be derived: every object is admissible as the extension of a sentence that is preserved under the substitution of co-extensional expressions. (...)
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  9. A note on compositionality in the first order language.Janusz Maciaszek & Luis Villegas-Forero - forthcoming - Bulletin of the Section of Logic.
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  10. Compositionality in Context.Alexandru Baltag, Johan van Benthem & Dag Westerståhl - 2023 - In Alessandra Palmigiano & Mehrnoosh Sadrzadeh (eds.), Samson Abramsky on Logic and Structure in Computer Science and Beyond. Springer Verlag. pp. 773-812.
    Compositionality is a principle used in logic, philosophy, mathematics, linguistics, and computer science for assigning meanings to language expressions in a systematic manner following syntactic construction, thereby allowing for a perspicuous algebraic view of the syntax-semantics interface. Yet the status of the principle remains under debate, with positions ranging from compositionality always being achievable to its having genuine empirical content. This paper attempts to sort out some major issues in all this from a logical perspective. First, we stress the fundamental (...)
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  11. Compositionality and constituent structure in the analogue mind.Sam Clarke - 2023 - Philosophical Perspectives 37 (1):90-118.
    I argue that analogue mental representations possess a canonical decomposition into privileged constituents from which they compose. I motivate this suggestion, and rebut arguments to the contrary, through reflection on the approximate number system, whose representations are widely expected to have an analogue format. I then argue that arguments for the compositionality and constituent structure of these analogue representations generalize to other analogue mental representations posited in the human mind, such as those in early vision and visual imagery.
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  12. Implicit Bias, Intersectionality, Compositionality.Jules Holroyd, James Chamberlain, Robin Scaife & Ben Jenkins - 2023 - Philosophical Psychology.
    Recent empirical work attempts to investigate how implicit biases target those facing intersectional oppression. This is welcome, since early work on implicit biases focused on single axes of discrimination, such as race, gender, or age. However, the success of such empirical work on how biases target those facing intersectional oppressions depends on adequate conceptualizations of intersectionality and empirical measures that are responsive to these conceptualizations. Surveying prominent recent empirical work, we identify failures in conceptualizations of intersectionality that inform the design (...)
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  13. Against Fregean Quantification.Bryan Pickel & Brian Rabern - 2023 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 9 (37):971-1007.
    There are two dominant approaches to quantification: the Fregean and the Tarskian. While the Tarskian approach is standard and familiar, deep conceptual objections have been pressed against its employment of variables as genuine syntactic and semantic units. Because they do not explicitly rely on variables, Fregean approaches are held to avoid these worries. The apparent result is that the Fregean can deliver something that the Tarskian is unable to, namely a compositional semantic treatment of quantification centered on truth and reference. (...)
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  14. Pure Quotation in Linguistic Context.Brian Rabern - 2023 - Journal of Philosophical Logic 52 (2):393-413.
    A common framing has it that any adequate treatment of quotation has to abandon one of the following three principles: (i) The quoted expression is a syntactic constituent of the quote phrase; (ii) If two expressions are derived by applying the same syntactic rule to a sequence of synonymous expressions, then they are synonymous; (iii) The language contains synonymous but distinct expressions. In the following, a formal syntax and semantics will be provided for a quotational language which adheres to all (...)
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  15. The operator argument and the case of timestamp semantics.Jakub Węgrecki - 2023 - Synthese 202 (6):1-28.
    The Operator Argument against eternalism holds that having non-vacuous tense operators in the language is incompatible with the claim that every proposition has its truth-value eternally. Assuming that (1) there are non-vacuous tense operators, (2) tense operators operate on propositions and (3) tense operators which operate on eternal entities are vacuous, it may be argued that eternalism is false. In this paper, I examine the Operator Argument. The goal is threefold. First, I want to present some aspects of the debate (...)
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  16. An Essay on Compositionality of Thoughts in Frege’s Philosophy.Krystian Bogucki - 2022 - Philosophical Papers 51 (1):1-43.
    In the paper, I propose a novel approach to Frege’s view on the principle of compositionality, its relation to the propositional holism and the formation of concepts. The main idea is to distinguish three stages of constructing a logically perfect language. At the first stage, only a sentence as a whole expresses a Thought. It is impossible to assign meaning to less complex units. This is the stage of an ordinary language. The second phase concerns the proper level of construction (...)
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  17. Does Compositionality Entail Complexity?John Adorno Keller - 2022 - Philosophers' Imprint 22.
    Propositions are (generally taken to be) the semantic values of declarative sentences in context. There is a long history of thinking that an important reason for taking propositions to be structured stems from the fact that the semantic values of such sentences are (typically) compositionally determined. In this paper, I argue that compositionality does not entail, nor provide good evidence for, the claim that propositions are structured. I go on to argue that there is no additional feature of declarative sentences—for (...)
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  18. Atomism, Concepts, and Polysemy.Kamil Lemanek - 2022 - Philosophia 50 (3):1243-1264.
    The aim of this paper is to examine the theoretical architecture of semantic atomism and its consequences with respect to natural language. In particular, it looks to explore the notion of possible concepts using the fundamental distinction between simple and complex concepts and expressions in Jerry Fodor’s atomism. The distinction is exploited to produce an unusual type of concept referred to as a correlate, which effectively mirrors complex concepts while maintaining a distinct underlying structure. Though harmless in and of themselves, (...)
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  19. Hierarchical clustering optimizes the tradeoff between compositionality and expressivity of task structures for flexible reinforcement learning.Rex G. Liu & Michael J. Frank - 2022 - Artificial Intelligence 312 (C):103770.
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  20. Really Complex Demonstratives: A Dilemma.Ethan Nowak - 2022 - Erkenntnis 87 (4):1-24.
    I have two aims for the present paper, one narrow and one broad. The narrow aim is to show that a class of data originally described by Lynsey Wolter empirically undermine the leading treatments of complex demonstratives that have been described in the literature. The broader aim of the paper is to show that Wolter demonstratives, as I will call the constructions I focus on, are a threat not just to existing treatments, but to any possible theory that retains the (...)
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  21. Scorekeeping in a chess game.Bryan Pickel & Brian Rabern - 2022 - Semantics and Pragmatics 15 (12).
    There is an important analogy between languages and games. Just as a scoresheet records features of the evolution of a game to determine the effect of a move in that game, a conversational score records features of the evolution of a conversation to determine the effect of the linguistic moves that speakers make. Chess is particularly interesting for the study of conversational dynamics because it has language-like notations, and so serves as a simplified study in how the effect of an (...)
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  22. Predictive minds can think: addressing generality and surface compositionality of thought.Sofiia Rappe - 2022 - Synthese 200 (1):1-22.
    Predictive processing framework has found wide applications in cognitive science and philosophy. It is an attractive candidate for a unified account of the mind in which perception, action, and cognition fit together in a single model. However, PP cannot claim this role if it fails to accommodate an essential part of cognition—conceptual thought. Recently, Williams argued that PP struggles to address at least two of thought’s core properties—generality and rich compositionality. In this paper, I show that neither necessarily presents a (...)
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  23. The many-property problem is your problem, too.Justin D’Ambrosio - 2021 - Philosophical Studies 178 (3):811-832.
    The many-property problem has traditionally been taken to show that the adverbial theory of perception is untenable. This paper first shows that several widely accepted views concerning the nature of perception---including both representational and non-representational views---likewise face the many-property problem. It then presents a solution to the many-property problem for these views, but goes on to show how this solution can be adapted to provide a novel, fully compositional solution to the many-property problem for adverbialism. Thus, with respect to the (...)
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  24. Book Review: Neanderthal Language: Demystifying the Linguistic Powers of Our Extinct Cousins. [REVIEW]Petar Gabrić - 2021 - Frontiers in Psychology 12:702361.
    Recently, we have witnessed an explosion of studies and discussions claiming that Neanderthals engaged in a range of “symbolic” behaviors, including personal ornament use (Radovčić et al., 2015), funerary practices (Balzeau et al., 2020), visual arts (Hoffmann et al., 2018), body aesthetics (Roebroeks et al., 2012), etc. In Paleolithic archaeology, it has become mainstream to axiomatically infer from these putative behaviors that Neanderthals engaged in symbol use and that Neanderthals thus possessed some form of language. Rudolf Botha's bombastic title "Neanderthal (...)
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  25. Disquotationalism and the Compositional Principles.Richard Kimberly Heck - 2021 - In Carlo Nicolai & Johannes Stern (eds.), Modes of Truth: The Unified Approach to Modality, Truth, and Paradox. Routledge. pp. 105--50.
    What Bar-On and Simmons call 'Conceptual Deflationism' is the thesis that truth is a 'thin' concept in the sense that it is not suited to play any explanatory role in our scientific theorizing. One obvious place it might play such a role is in semantics, so disquotationalists have been widely concerned to argued that 'compositional principles', such as -/- (C) A conjunction is true iff its conjuncts are true -/- are ultimately quite trivial and, more generally, that semantic theorists have (...)
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  26. Interaction history as a source of compositionality in emergent communication.Tomasz Korbak, Julian Zubek, Łukasz Kuciński, Piotr Miłoś & Joanna Rączaszek-Leonardi - 2021 - Interaction Studies 22 (2):212-243.
    In this paper, we explore interaction history as a particular source of pressure for achieving emergent compositional communication in multi-agent systems. We propose a training regime implementing template transfer, the idea of carrying over learned biases across contexts. In the presented method, a sender-receiver dyad is first trained with a disentangled pair of objectives, and then the receiver is transferred to train a new sender with a standard objective. Unlike other methods, the template transfer approach does not require imposing inductive (...)
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  27. I Like This Analysis, but I Don’t Think Every Linguist Will: Syntactic NOT-Transportation, VP Ellipsis and VP Pronominalisation.Diego Gabriel Krivochen - 2021 - Atlantis 2 (43):68-89.
    In this article I consider some recent objections raised against the syntactic treatment of negation in English multiclausal structures, in particular what has been called NEGraising. I argue that the objections based on pronominalisation and ellipsis presented in the recent literature do pose a problem for syntactic accounts of the mechanisms of so-called NOT-transportation that rely on a rule of leftwards movement, as is customary in generative grammar. However, there is an alternative syntactic treatment that assumes that negation originates as (...)
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  28. Mixed computation: grammar up and down the Chomsky Hierarchy.Diego Gabriel Krivochen - 2021 - Evolutionary Linguistic Theory 2 (3):215-244.
    Proof-theoretic models of grammar are based on the view that an explicit characterization of a language comes in the form of the recursive enumeration of strings in that language. That recur-sive enumeration is carried out by a procedure which strongly generates a set of structural de-scriptions Σ and weakly generates a set of strings S; a grammar is thus a function that pairs an element of Σ with elements of S. Structural descriptions are obtained by means of Context-Free phrase structure (...)
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  29. The myth of occurrence-based semantics.Bryan Pickel & Brian Rabern - 2021 - Linguistics and Philosophy 44:813-837.
    The principle of compositionality requires that the meaning of a complex expression remains the same after substitution of synonymous expressions. Alleged counterexamples to compositionality seem to force a theoretical choice: either apparent synonyms are not synonyms or synonyms do not syntactically occur where they appear to occur. Some theorists have instead looked to Frege’s doctrine of “reference shift” according to which the meaning of an expression is sensitive to its linguistic context. This doctrine is alleged to retain the relevant claims (...)
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  30. Semantic monsters.Brian Rabern - 2021 - In Heimir Geirsson & Stephen Biggs (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Linguistic Reference. Routledge. pp. 515-532.
    This chapter provides a general overview of the issues surrounding so-called semantic monsters. In section 1, I outline the basics of Kaplan’s framework and spell out how and why the topic of “monsters” arises within that framework. In Section 2, I distinguish four notions of a monster that are discussed in the literature, and show why, although they can pull apart in different frameworks or with different assumptions, they all coincide within Kaplan’s framework. In Section 3, I discuss one notion (...)
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  31. Semantics with Assignment Variables.Alex Silk - 2021 - Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
    This book combines insights from philosophy and linguistics to develop a novel framework for theorizing about linguistic meaning and the role of context in interpretation. A key innovation is to introduce explicit representations of context — assignment variables — in the syntax and semantics of natural language. The proposed theory systematizes a spectrum of “shifting” phenomena in which the context relevant for interpreting certain expressions depends on features of the linguistic environment. Central applications include local and nonlocal contextual dependencies with (...)
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  32. Inferentialism is as Compositional as it Needs to be.Nicholas Tebben - 2021 - Contemporary Pragmatism 18 (3):263-286.
    Normative inferentialism is a semantic theory according to which the meaning of an expression is, or is determined by, its proper inferential role. Critics of inferentialism often argue that it violates the principle of compositionality, and that it is therefore unable to explain some important linguistic data. I have two tasks in this paper: the first is to demonstrate that inferentialism, appearances perhaps to the contrary, does not violate the principle of compositionality, and the second is to explain why this (...)
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  33. Extensional Superposition and Its Relation to Compositionality in Language and Thought.Chris Thornton - 2021 - Cognitive Science 45 (5):e12929.
    Semantic composition in language must be closely related to semantic composition in thought. But the way the two processes are explained differs considerably. Focusing primarily on propositional content, language theorists generally take semantic composition to be a truth‐conditional process. Focusing more on extensional content, cognitive theorists take it to be a form of concept combination. But though deep, this disconnect is not irreconcilable. Both areas of theory assume that extensional (i.e., denotational) meanings must play a role. As this article demonstrates, (...)
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  34. Natural Langage Processing.Ilexa Yardley - 2021 - Https://Medium.Com/the-Circular-Theory/.
  35. Compositionality in Truth Conditional Pragmatics.Adrian Briciu - 2020 - In Tadeusz Ciecierski & Pawel Grabarczyk (eds.), The Architecture of Context and Context-Sensitivity. New York: Springer. pp. 205-226.
    In the past decade various linguists and philosophers (e.g. Pagin, Pelletier, Recanati, Westerståhl, Lasersohn) have proposed a weakening of the standard interpretation of compositionality for propositional content. Their move is motivated by the desire to accommodate radical forms of context sensitivity within a systematic account of natural languages. In this paper I argue against weakening compositionality in the way proposed by them. I argue that weak compositionality fails to provide some of the expected benefits of compositionality. First, weak compositionality fails (...)
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  36. Binding, Compositionality, and Semantic Values.Michael Glanzberg & Jeffrey C. King - 2020 - Philosophers' Imprint 20.
    In this paper, we defend a traditional approach to semantics, that holds that the outputs of compositional semantics are propositional, i.e. truth conditions. Though traditional, this view has been challenged on a number of fronts over the years. Since classic work of Lewis, arguments have been offered which purport to show that semantic composition requires values that are relativized, e.g. to times, or other parameters that render them no longer propositional. Focusing in recent variants of these arguments involving quantification and (...)
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  37. A Puzzle concerning Compositionality in Machines.Ryan M. Nefdt - 2020 - Minds and Machines 30 (1):47-75.
    This paper attempts to describe and address a specific puzzle related to compositionality in artificial networks such as Deep Neural Networks and machine learning in general. The puzzle identified here touches on a larger debate in Artificial Intelligence related to epistemic opacity but specifically focuses on computational applications of human level linguistic abilities or properties and a special difficulty with relation to these. Thus, the resulting issue is both general and unique. A partial solution is suggested.
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  38. Might generics.Brian Rabern - 2020 - Snippets 39:8-9.
    How do generics interact with modals? This note offers one observation about an interaction with 'might' that presents a challenge for standard theories.
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  39. Compositionality and Expressive Power: Comments on Pietroski.Elmar Unnsteinsson - 2020 - Croatian Journal of Philosophy 20 (3):295-310.
    Paul Pietroski has developed a powerful minimalist and internalist alternative to standard compositional semantics, where meanings are identified with instructions to fetch or assemble human concepts in specific ways. In particular, there appears to be no need for Fregean Function Application, as natural language composition only involves processes of combining monadic or dyadic concepts, and Pietroski’s theory can then, allegedly, avoid both singular reference and truth conditions. He also has a negative agenda, purporting to show, roughly, that the vocabulary of (...)
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  40. An invitation to applied category theory: seven sketches in compositionality.Brendan Fong - 2019 - New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Edited by David I. Spivak.
    Category theory reveals commonalities between structures of all sorts. This book shows its potential in science, engineering, and beyond.
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  41. Can Compositionality Solve the Thought-or-Language Problem?Raquel Krempel - 2019 - Philosophical Papers 48 (2):265-291.
    Jerry Fodor has claimed to have a solution to the traditional problem of what comes first, thought or language. Compositionality, he says, will give us the answer, for at least one must be compositional, and if only one of them is, that is the one that has underived semantic content. He argues that natural languages are not compositional, and therefore that the content of language is derived from the content of thought. I will argue that the idea that language is (...)
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  42. The philosophy of linguistics: Scientific underpinnings and methodological disputes.Ryan M. Nefdt - 2019 - Philosophy Compass 14 (12):e12636.
    This article surveys the philosophical literature on theoretical linguistics. The focus of the paper is centred around the major debates in the philosophy of linguistics, past and present, with specific relation to how they connect to the philosophy of science. Specific issues such as scientific realism in linguistics, the scientific status of grammars, the methodological underpinnings of formal semantics, and the integration of linguistics into the larger cognitive sciences form the crux of the discussion.
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  43. Compositionality.Peter Pagin & Dag Westersã̃hl - 2019 - In Claudia Maienborn, Klaus von Heusinger & Paul Portner (eds.), Semantics: foundations, history and methods. De Gruyter.
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  44. Compositionality and the Prospect of a Pluralistic Semantic Theory.Adam C. Podlaskowski - 2019 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 97 (2):325-339.
    A semantic theory is committed to semantic monism just in case every particular semantic property posited by the theory is a member of the same kind. The commitment to semantic monism appears to draw some support from the need to provide a compositional semantics, since taking a single kind of semantic property as key to a semantic theory affords a uniform pattern on the basis of which the meaning of any given sentence can be compositionally determined. This line of support (...)
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  45. Context-Free Semantics.Paolo Santorio - 2019 - In Ernie LePore & David Sosa (eds.), Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Language, Volume 1. Oxford University Press. pp. 208-239.
    On a traditional view, the semantics of natural language makes essential use of a context parameter, i.e. a set of coordinates that represents the situation of speech. In classical semantic frameworks, this parameter plays two key roles: first, context contributes to determining the content of utterance; second, it is crucial for defining logical consequence. I point out that recent empirical proposals about context shift in natural language (in particular, context-shifting semantics in the style of Anand and Nevins 2004) are incompatible (...)
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  46. Unconditionals and free choice unified.Anna Szabolcsi - 2019 - Semantics and Linguistic Theory 29.
    Rawlins (2013: 160) observes that both unconditionals and more classical free choice can be meta-characterized using orthogonality, but does not actually unify the two. One reason may be that in English, different expressions serve in these roles. By contrast, in Hungarian, AKÁR expressions serve as NPIs, FCIs, and unconditional adjuncts, but not as interrogatives or free relatives. This paper offers a unified account of the Hungarian data, extending Chierchia 2013 and Dayal 2013. The account produces the same unconditional meanings that (...)
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  47. Operator arguments revisited.Juhani Yli-Vakkuri, John Hawthorne & Peter Fritz - 2019 - Philosophical Studies 176 (11):2933-2959.
    Certain passages in Kaplan’s ‘Demonstratives’ are often taken to show that non-vacuous sentential operators associated with a certain parameter of sentential truth require a corresponding relativism concerning assertoric contents: namely, their truth values also must vary with that parameter. Thus, for example, the non-vacuity of a temporal sentential operator ‘always’ would require some of its operands to have contents that have different truth values at different times. While making no claims about Kaplan’s intentions, we provide several reconstructions of how such (...)
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  48. Smell's puzzling discrepancy: Gifted discrimination, yet pitiful identification.Benjamin D. Young - 2019 - Mind and Language 35 (1):90-114.
  49. The Science of Meaning: Essays on the Metatheory of Natural Language Semantics.Derek Ball & Brian Rabern (eds.) - 2018 - Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    By creating certain marks on paper, or by making certain sounds-breathing past a moving tongue-or by articulation of hands and bodies, language users can give expression to their mental lives. With language we command, assert, query, emote, insult, and inspire. Language has meaning. This fact can be quite mystifying, yet a science of linguistic meaning-semantics-has emerged at the intersection of a variety of disciplines: philosophy, linguistics, computer science, and psychology. Semantics is the study of meaning. But what exactly is "meaning"? (...)
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  50. On Context Shifters and Compositionality in Natural Languages.Adrian Briciu - 2018 - Organon F: Medzinárodný Časopis Pre Analytickú Filozofiu 25 (1):2-20.
    My modest aim in this paper is to prove certain relations between some type of hyper-intensional operators, namely context shifting operators, and compositionality in natural languages. Various authors (e.g. von Fintel & Matthewson 2008; Stalnaker 2014) have argued that context-shifting operators are incompatible with compositionality. In fact, some of them understand Kaplan’s (1989) famous ban on context-shifting operators as a constraint on compositionality. Others, (e.g. Rabern 2013) take contextshifting operators to be compatible with compositionality but, unfortunately, do not provide a (...)
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