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19. Language / C. Assigning Meanings / 4. Compositionality

[sentence meaning as built up from its components]

16 ideas
Frege's account was top-down and decompositional, not bottom-up and compositional [Frege, by Potter]
Propositions are understood via their constituents [Wittgenstein]
Propositions use old expressions for a new sense [Wittgenstein]
Compositionality explains how long sentences work, and truth conditions are the main compositional feature [Davidson, by Lycan]
If you assign semantics to sentence parts, the sentence fails to compose a whole [Davidson]
Encountering novel sentences shows conclusively that meaning must be compositional [Peacocke]
The content of an assertion can be quite different from compositional content [Yablo]
Negative existentials with compositionality make the whole sentence meaningless [Read]
Compositonality is a way to build up the truth-conditions of a sentence [Hofweber]
Compositionality should rely on the parsing tree, which may contain more than sentence components [Potter]
'Direct compositonality' says the components wholly explain a sentence meaning [Potter]
Compositionality is more welcome in logic than in linguistics (which is more contextual) [Potter]
Strong compositionality says meaningful expressions syntactically well-formed are meaningful [Magidor]
Weaker compositionality says meaningful well-formed sentences get the meaning from the parts [Magidor]
Understanding unlimited numbers of sentences suggests that meaning is compositional [Magidor]
Semantic theories show how truth of sentences depends on rules for interpreting and joining their parts [Schroeter]