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12.1: Introduction

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    138687
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    One of the central goals of semantics is to explain how meanings of sentences are related to the meanings of their parts. In Chapter 3 we discussed the simple sentence in (1), and how the meaning of the sentence determines the conditions under which it would be true.

    (1) King Henry VIII snores.

    Let us now consider the question of how the meaning of this sentence is composed from the meanings of its parts. What are the parts, and what kinds of meanings do they express? Any syntactic description of the sentence will recognize two immediate constituents: the subject NP King Henry VIII and the intransitive verb (or VP) snores. These two phrases express different kinds of meaning. The subject NP is a referring expression, specifically a proper name, which refers to an individual in the world. The intransitive VP expresses a property which may be true of some individuals but not of others in a given situation. The result of combining them, i.e. the meaning of the sentence as a whole, is a proposition (or claim about the world) which may be true in some situations and false in others. Sentence (1) expresses an assertion that the individual named by the subject NP (King Henry VIII) has the property named by the VP (he snores). This pattern for combining NP meanings with VP meanings is seen in many, perhaps most, simple declarative sentences.

    The same basic principle holds not just for sentences but for any expression (apart from idioms) consisting of more than one word: the meaning of the whole is composed, or built up, in a predictable way from the meanings of the parts. This is what makes it possible for us to understand newly-created sentences. One way of expressing this principle is the following:

    (2) Principle of Compositionality:
    the meaning of a complex expression is determined by the meanings of its constituent expressions and the way in which they are combined.

    Many semanticists adopt as a working hypothesis a stronger version of this principle, which says (roughly speaking) that there must be a one-to-one correspondence between the syntactic rules that build constituents and the semantic rules that provide interpretations for those constituents. Adopting this stronger version of the principle places significant constraints on the way these rules get written.1 In Chapter 13 we will see a few very simple examples of how syntactic and semantic rules can be correlated.

    In this chapter we lay a foundation for discussing compositionality in the more general sense expressed in (2). We are trying to understand what is involved in the claim that the meanings of phrases and sentences are predictable based on the meanings of their constituents and the manner in which those constituents get combined.

    We begin in §12.2 by describing two very simple examples of compositional meaning: first, the combination of a subject NP with a VP to form a simple clause (Henry snores); and second, the combination of a modifying adjective with a common noun (yellow submarine). In Chapter 13 we will formulate rules to account for these patterns, among others.

    In §12.3 we provide some historical context for the study of compositionality by sketching out some ideas from the German logician Gottlob Frege (1848–1925). We will summarize Frege’s arguments for the claim that denotations, as well as senses, must be compositional. But Frege also pointed out that there are some contexts where the denotation of a complex expression is not fully predictable from the denotations of its constituents. We discuss one such context in §12.4, namely complement clauses of verbs like think, believe, want, etc. In §12.5 we discuss a particular type of ambiguity which can arise in such contexts.


    1 Partee (1995: 322).


    This page titled 12.1: Introduction is shared under a CC BY 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Paul Kroeger (Language Library Press) via source content that was edited to the style and standards of the LibreTexts platform; a detailed edit history is available upon request.

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