The Oxford Handbook of Compositionality

by Werning, Markus; Hinzen, Wolfram; Machery, Edouard

• ISBN13: 9780199541072
• ISBN10: 0199541078
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2012-04-07
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

Compositionality is a key concept in linguistics, the philosophy of mind and language, and throughout the cognitive sciences. Understanding how it works is a central element of syntactic and semantic analysis and a challenge for models of cognition. In this book leading scholars from every relevant field report on the state of the art in all aspects of the subject. They reveal the connections in different lines of research and highlight its most challenging problems and opportunities. The force and justification of compositionality have long been contentious. First proposed by Frege as the notion that the meaning of an expression is generally determined by the meaning and syntax of its parts, it has since been deployed as a constraint on the relation between theories of syntax and semantics, as a means of analysis, and more recently as underlying the structures of representational systems such as computer programs and neural architectures.The Oxford Handbook of Compositionalityexplores these and many other dimensions of one of the most exciting fields in the study of language and cognition. It will appeal to researchers and advanced students in linguistics and philosophy and to a broad range of cognitive scientists including those

Author Biography

Markus Werning is Professor of Philosophy of Language and Cognition at the Ruhr University of Bochum. He is author of the book The Compositional Brain: Neuronal Foundations of Conceptual Representation (Mentis, 2010).

Wolfram Hinzen is Professor of Philosophy of Language at the University of Durham. His books include Mind Design and Minimal Syntax and An Essay on Names and Truth (OUP, 2006, 2007).

Edouard Machery is Associate Professor in the History and Philosophy of Science Department at the University of Pittsburgh. His book Doing without Concepts was published by OUP in 2009.

Table of Contents

List of Abbreviations	p. ix
Acknowledgements	p. xi
The Contributors	p. xii
Introduction	p. 1
History and Overview
Compositionality: its historic context	p. 19
Compositionality in Montague Grammar	p. 47
The case for compositionality	p. 64
Compositionality problems and how to solve them	p. 81
Compositionality in Language
Direct Compositionality	p. 109
Semantic monadicity with conceptual polyadicity	p. 129
Holism and compositionality	p. 149
Compositionality, flexibility, and context dependence	p. 175
Compositionality in Kaplan style semantics	p. 192
Sub-compositionality	p. 220
Compositionality in Formal Semantics
Formalizing the relationship between meaning and syntax	p. 245
Compositionality and the Context Principle	p. 262
Compositionality in discourse from a logical perspective	p. 279
Lexical Decomposition
Lexical decomposition in grammar	p. 307
Lexical decomposition in modern syntactic theory	p. 328
Syntax in the atom	p. 351
Co-compositionality in grammar	p. 371
The Compositionality of Mind
Typicality and compositionality: the logic of combining vague concepts	p. 385
Emergency!!!! Challenges to a compositional understanding of noun-noun combinations	p. 403
Can prototype representations support composition and decomposition?	p. 418
Regaining composure: a defence of prototype compositionality	p. 437
Simple heuristics for concept combination	p. 454
Evolutionary and Communicative Success
Compositionality and beyond: embodied meaning in language and protolanguage	p. 475
Compositionality and linguistic evolution	p. 493
Communication and the complexity of semantics	p. 510
Prototypes and their composition from an evolutionary point of view	p. 530
Neural Models of Compositional Representation
Connectionism, dynamical cognition, and non-classical compositional representation	p. 557
The Dual-Mechanism debate	p. 574
Compositionality and biologically plausible models	p. 596
Neuronal assembly models of compositionality	p. 616
Non-symbolic compositional representation and its neuronal foundation: towards an emulative semantics	p. 633
The processing consequences of compositionality	p. 655
References	p. 673
Index	p. 725
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