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Single Idea 12610

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

Full Idea

The phenomenon of understanding sentences one has never encountered before is decisive against theories of meaning which do not proceed compositionally.

Clarification

'Compositionality' is building up meanings a bit at a time

Gist of Idea

Encountering novel sentences shows conclusively that meaning must be compositional

Source

Christopher Peacocke (Truly Understood [2008], 4.3)

Book Ref

Peacocke,Christopher: 'Truly Understood' [OUP 2008], p.135

A Reaction

I agree entirely. It seems obvious, as soon as you begin to slowly construct a long and unusual sentence, and follow the mental processes of the listener.

The 16 ideas with the same theme [sentence meaning as built up from its components]:

22280 Frege's account was top-down and decompositional, not bottom-up and compositional [Frege, by Potter]
23488 Propositions are understood via their constituents [Wittgenstein]
23511 Propositions use old expressions for a new sense [Wittgenstein]
7772 Compositionality explains how long sentences work, and truth conditions are the main compositional feature [Davidson, by Lycan]
19133 If you assign semantics to sentence parts, the sentence fails to compose a whole [Davidson]
12610 Encountering novel sentences shows conclusively that meaning must be compositional [Peacocke]
18994 The content of an assertion can be quite different from compositional content [Yablo]
11005 Negative existentials with compositionality make the whole sentence meaningless [Read]
21655 Compositonality is a way to build up the truth-conditions of a sentence [Hofweber]
22283 Compositionality should rely on the parsing tree, which may contain more than sentence components [Potter]
22282 'Direct compositonality' says the components wholly explain a sentence meaning [Potter]
22296 Compositionality is more welcome in logic than in linguistics (which is more contextual) [Potter]
18000 Weaker compositionality says meaningful well-formed sentences get the meaning from the parts [Magidor]
17999 Strong compositionality says meaningful expressions syntactically well-formed are meaningful [Magidor]
18014 Understanding unlimited numbers of sentences suggests that meaning is compositional [Magidor]
14695 Semantic theories show how truth of sentences depends on rules for interpreting and joining their parts [Schroeter]