Single Idea 18994

[catalogued under 19. Language / C. Assigning Meanings / 4. Compositionality]

Full Idea

Assertive content - what a sentence is heard as saying - can be at quite a distance from compositional content.

Gist of Idea

The content of an assertion can be quite different from compositional content

Source

Stephen Yablo (Aboutness [2014], Intro)

Book Reference

Yablo,Stephen: 'Aboutness' [Princeton 2014], p.5


A Reaction

This is the obvious reason why semantics cannot be entirely compositional, since there is nearly always a contextual component which then has to be added. In the case of irony, the compositional content is entirely reversed.