someconsequencesofcompositionality.docVIP

Some Consequences of Compositionality James Higginbotham University of Southern California* 1. General Discussion. According to the view that I advance here, the thesis that the semantics of human first languages is compositional should be understood as imposing a locality requirement on the computation of semantic values. So understood, it may form part of a restrictive theory of semantics, intended to contribute to an account of human linguistic competence, and first-language acquisition. Taken to extremes, however, compositionality is apparently false, both for humdrum examples such as those given below, and for more tendentious cases such as those suggested in Higginbotham (1986), and others, only a couple of which I shall be able to consider here. Moreover, there are significant problems even in formulating the compositionality thesis for long-distance linguistic relations. My aim here will not be to examine all of these points in detail, but rather to clarify what I take to be at empirical issue in the discussion. The (by now considerable) literature on compositionality does not tire of repeating that compositionality holds if the interpretation of a sentence (or discourse) is determined by the meanings of its parts, and the way they are combined, or other words to that effect. Nor does it tire of stating that, so understood, the compositionality thesis verges on the trivial. For, there being nothing else but the parts of a sentence and the way they are combined to give its interpretation, what else could interpretation be determined by? The thesis is not quite trivial, however, inasmuch as it presupposes that there is such a thing as “the interpretation of a sentence or discourse” in a proper, context-independent, sense. Thus, one could propose a point of view according to which semantics, or what is determined independently of context in virtue of linguistic form, and pragmatics, or what is supplied within context, are treated together in an ove