Interpreted Languages and Compositionality

ISBN-13: 9789400721074 / Angielski / Twarda / 2011 / 214 str.

Marcus Kracht

Opis

This book argues that languages are composed of sets of signs, rather than strings . This notion, first posited by de Saussure in the early 20^th century, has for decades been neglected by linguists, particularly following Chomsky s heavy critiques of the 1950s. Yet since the emergence of formal semantics in the 1970s, the issue of compositionality has gained traction in the theoretical debate, becoming a selling point for linguistic theories. Yet the concept of compositionality itself remains ill-defined, an issue this book addresses. Positioning compositionality as a cornerstone in linguistic theory, it argues that, contrary to widely held beliefs, there exist non-compositional languages, which shows that the concept of compositionality has empirical content. The author asserts that the existence of syntactic structure can flow from the fact that a compositional grammar cannot be delivered without prior agreement on the syntactic structure of the constituents."

Spis treści

1. Synopsis .- 2. String Languages . 2.1 Languages and Grammars . 2.2 Parts and Substitution . 2.3 Grammars and String Categories . 2.4 Indeterminacy and Adjunction . 2.5. Syntactic Structure . 2.6 The Principle of Preservation .- 3. Compositionality . 3.1 Compositionality . 3.2 Interpreted Languages and Grammars . 3.3 Compositionality and Independence .  3.4 Categories . 3.5 Weak and Strong Generative Capacity . 3.6 Indeterminacy in Interpreted Grammars . 3.7 Abstraction  .- 4. Meanings . 4.1 ‘Desyntactified’ Meanings .  4.2 Predicate Logic . 4.3 Concepts . 4.4 Linking Aspects and Constructional Meanings . 4.5 Concepts and Pictures . 4.6 Ambiguity and Identity . 4.7 Profiling .- 5. Examples . 5.1 Predicate . 5.2 Concept Based Predicate Logic . 5.3  A Fragment of English . 5.4 Concepts and LF 5.5 The Structure of Dutch . 5.6 Arguing for Syntactic Structure .- 6. Conclusion .- A. Useful Mathematical Concepts and Notation .- B. Symbols .- C. Index .- Bibliography