Compositionality: The Very Idea

摘要

Compositionality is often considered a fundamental principle of semantics for natural language. Yet only fairly recently has there been something of a theory of compositionality which allows to prove actual results. Basically, the lack of progress has been due to an improper understanding of what syntactic and semantic structures actually are. Many linguistic theories in one way or another confuse them by importing semantic notions into syntax or—conversely—adding syntactic detail to semantic structures. In this paper I shall outline a theory of semantic and syntactic structures and show how it avoids the problems that beset the previous theories. A particular benefit of this approach is that it allows to show results on sentential structure.