Interpreted Languages and Compositionality

by Kracht, Marcus

• ISBN13: 9789400721074
• ISBN10: 9400721072
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-09-28
• Publisher: Springer Verlag

Summary

This book argues that languages are composed of sets of '¬Üsigns'¬", rather than '¬Üstrings'¬". This notion, first posited by de Saussure in the early 20th century, has for decades been neglected by linguists, particularly following Chomsky'¬"s heavy critiques of the 1950s. Yet since the emergence of formal semantics in the 1970s, the issue of compositionality has gained traction in the theoretical debate, becoming a selling point for linguistic theories.Yet the concept of '¬Ücompositionality'¬" itself remains ill-defined, an issue this book addresses. Positioning compositionality as a cornerstone in linguistic theory, it argues that, contrary to widely held beliefs, there exist non-compositional languages, which shows that the concept of compositionality has empirical content. The author asserts that the existence of syntactic structure can flow from the fact that a compositional grammar cannot be delivered without prior agreement on the syntactic structure of the constituents.