Abstract
Ordinary semantic compositionality (meaning of whole determined from meanings of parts plus composition) can serve to explain how a hearer manages to assign an appropriate meaning to a new sentence. But it does not serve to explain how the speaker manages to find an appropriate sentence for expressing a new thought. For this we would need a principle of inverse compositionality, by which the expression of a complex content is determined by the expressions of it parts and the mode of composition. But this presupposes that contents have constituent structure, and this cannot be taken for granted. However, it can be proved that if a certain principle of substitutivity is valid for a particular language, then the meanings expressed by its sentences can justifiably be treated as structured. In its simplest form, this principle says that if in a complex expression a constituent is replaced by another constituent with a different meaning, the new complexhas a meaning different from the original. This principle is again inversely related to the normal compositional principle of substitutivity. The combination of ordinary and inverse compositionality is here called ‘strong compositionality’. The proof is carried out in the algebraic framework developed by Wilfrid Hodges and Dag Westerståhl.
Similar content being viewed by others
REFERENCES
Carnap, R. (1956): Meaning and Necessity, 2nd edn, University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Chomsky, N. (1965): Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.
Cresswell, M. (1986): Structured Meanings, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.
Fodor, J. (1987): Psychosemantics, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.
Fodor, J. (1996): Connectionism and systematicity (continues): Why Smolensky's solution still doesn't work, Cognition 62, 109–119. Reprinted in (Fodor, 1998b). Page references to the reprint.
Fodor, J. (1995): Review of Christopher Peacock's A Study of Concepts, London Review of Books, April 20. Reprinted in (Fodor, 1998b). Page references to the reprint.
Fodor, J. (1998): Concepts. Where Cognitive Science Went Wrong, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Fodor, J. (1998b): In Critical Condition, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.
Fodor, J. (2000): Reply to critics, Mind & Language 15, 350–374.
Frege, G. (1897): Logik, in Frege, Schriften zur Logik und Sprachphilosophie. Aus dem Nachlass, Felix Meiner Verlag, Hamburg, 1978.
Frege, G. (1923): Compound thoughts (Gedankengefüge), Beträge zur Philosophie des Deutschen Idealismus, 36–51. Reprinted in Frege, Logische Untersuchungen, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen, 1976. Translation by R. Stoothoff published in Mind 72 (1963), 1–17.
Gödel, K. (1931): On formally undecidable propositions of Principia Mathematica and related systems I, in J. van Heijenoort (ed.), Frege and Gödel. Two Fundamental Texts in Mathematical Logic, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1970. Originally published as ‘Ñber formal unentscheidbare Sätze der Principia mathematica und verwandter System I', Monatsh. Math. Phys. 38, 173–198.
Grätzer, G. (1968): Universal Algebra, D. Van Nostrand, Inc., Princeton, NJ.
Hendrix, H. Compositionality and model-theoretic interpretation, J. Logic, Language and Information 10, 29–48.
Hodges, W. (1998): Compositionality is not the problem, Logic and Logical Philosophy 6, 7–33.
Hodges, W. (2001): Formal features of compositionality, J. Logic, Language and Information 10, 7–28.
Janssen, T. (1984): Foundations and Applications of Montague Grammar, Centre for Mathematics and Computer Science, Amsterdam.
Katz, J. and Postal, P. M. (1964): An Integrated Theory of Linguistic Descriptions, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.
Janssen, T. (1997): Compositionality, in J. van Benthem and A. ter Meulen (eds), Handbook of Logic and Language, Elsevier, Amsterdam.
Larson, R. and Segal, G. (1995): Knowledge of Meaning. An introduction to Semantic Theory, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.
Lewis, D. (1972): General semantics, in D. Davidson and G. Harman (eds), Semantics of Natural Language, Reidel, Dordrecht.
Montague, R. (1970): Universal grammar, Theoria 36, 373–398. Reprinted in R. Thomason (ed.), Formal Philosophy. Selected Papers of Richard Montague, Yale University Press, New Haven. Page references to the reprint.
Pagin, P. (2003): Schiffer on communication, Facta Philosophica 5, 25–48.
Schiffer, S. (1987): Remnants of Meaning, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.
Schiffer, S. (1991): Does mentalese have a compositional semantics?, in B. Loewer and G. Rey (eds), Meaning in Mind; Fodor and His Critics, Blackwell, Oxford.
Tarski, A. (1935): Der Wahrheitsbegriff in den formalisierten Sprachen, Studia Philosophica, Leopoli. Translated as ‘The concept of truth in formalized languages', in Tarski, Logic, Semantics, Metamathematics, J. Corcoran (ed.), Hackett Publishing, Indianapolis, 1983. Page references to the 1983 edition.
Westerståhl, D. (forthcoming): On the compositionality of idioms: An abstract approach, in D. Barker-Plummer, D. Beaver, J. van Benthem and P. Scotto di Luzio (eds), Proceedings of LLC8, CSLI Publications, Stanford.
Westerståhl, D. (unpublished): On extensions of compositional semantics: Variations on a result by Hodges, draft.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Pagin, P. Communication and Strong Compositionality. Journal of Philosophical Logic 32, 287–322 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1024258529030
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1024258529030