12.6: Conclusion

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The passage from Frege quoted at the beginning of §12.3 describes the astonishing power of human language: “[E]ven for a thought grasped for the first time by a human it provides a clothing in which it can be recognized by another to whom it is entirely new.” It is this productivity, the ability to communicate novel ideas, that we seek to understand when we try to account for the compositionality of sentence meanings.

In the next two chapters we offer a very brief introduction to a widely-used method for modeling how meanings of complex expressions are composed from the meanings of their constituent parts. Building on Frege’s intuition (discussed in §12.3 above) that the denotation of a sentence is its truth value, we describe a method for composing denotations of words and phrases to derive the truth conditions of the proposition expressed by a sentence. Then in Chapter 15 we discuss additional contexts where, as with the propositional attitude verbs discussed in §12.4 above, a purely denotational treatment is inadequate.