Right and Wrong Reasons for Compositionality
Markus Werning · 2005
In this paper I would like to cast a critical look on the potential reasons for com-positionality. I will, in particular, evaluate if and to which extent the most often cited reasons in favor of compositionality, viz. productivity, systematicity and inferentiality – each taken as properties of either language or cognition – may be justly regarded as justifications for compositionality. The results of this investi-gation will be largely negative: Given reasonable side-constraints, the reason of productivity faces counterexamples of productive languages that cannot be eval-uated compositionally. Systematicity has less to do with compositionality than with the existence of semantic categories. The belief that inferentiality is only warranted in compositional languages is a pious hope rather than a certainty. Alternative reasons will be explored at the end of the paper. Before I turn to its reasons, I will explicate the notion of compositionality and say something about its alleged vacuity. 1 The Notion of Compositionality Although the idea of compositionality is perhaps much older, the locus classicus is Frege’s posthumously published manuscript Logic in Mathematics: [...] thoughts have parts out of which they are built up. And these parts, these building blocks, correspond to groups of sounds, out of which the sentence expressing the thought is built up, so that the construction of the sentence out of parts of a sentence corresponds to the construction of a thought out of parts of a thought. And as we take a thought to be the sense of a sentence, so we may call a part of a thought the sense of that part of the sentence which corresponds to it. (Frege, 1914/1979, p. 225) Frege’s claim can be put in more general terms to make it acceptable even to someone who refuses to adopt thoughts and senses into his universe of dis-course. To do so, we must distinguish three aspects of Frege’s statement.