Talk by Laszlo Kalman
Strong Compositionality
The paper starts from the observation that the *principle of
Compositionality* is rather vacuous if we define it in the usual
way. It shows that two other principles should be adopted for
effectively ensuring what we intuitively understand by
`compositionality': the principle of *Independence* says that
the meanings of the sub-expressions of an expression are assigned
independently of each other and from the way in which they are put
together, and the principle of *Additivity* says that operations
that combine meanings must not destructively modify any previously
assigned meanings. The paper examines the consequences of adopting all
three principles, jointly called *Strong Compositionality*, for
linguistic theory. In particular, this principle prevents
*functional operations* that combine meanings from `running
free' in the grammar. In fact, under this approach, the functional
metaphor of syntactic and semantic incompleteness must be abandoned. A
formal theory of meanings that does not rely on the functor/operand
metaphor and its application to a small fragment of English is
presented.
Paul Dekker, November 2, 1995