Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: There has been extensive debate about the principle of compositionality among philosophers of language and formal semanticists, according to which the meaning of a complex expression is determined by the meanings of its parts and the way these parts are combined.Questions about this principle can be broadly divided into three categories: why we want compositionality, what the proper definition of compositionality should be, and how various semantic phenomena can be analyzed compositionally.In this paper, I will focus on the first question.After briefly surveying well-known arguments for compositionality, I will present two methodological arguments and examine their validity.
Source: Kagaku tetsugaku
Author: Ryouhei Takaya
Institution: Hokkai Gakuen University
Language: English
Subfield: Language and Linguistics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W4408978674