Semantic Compositionality and Truth-Conditional Content

Abstract

It is widely held that hearers grasp an utterance's truth conditions by assigning contents to the linguistic expressions used, and combining these contents according to semantic composition rules. To preserve compositionality of truth‐conditional content while accounting for context‐sensitivity that is not traceable to overt linguistic form, semanticists posit covert linguistic structure. The strongest justification for this approach is the allegedly unconstrained nature of the alternative, whereby a process of ‘free pragmatic enrichment’ supplies constituents of content that are not traceable to (overt or covert) encoded meaning. This paper argues that free enrichment is tightly constrained by purely pragmatic factors, thus undermining the motivation for semantic compositionality.

The relevance of words and the language/communication divide

“…The RT answer (or assumption) has been that it is a 'semantic representation' or 'logical form' , which is a conceptual structure, the conceptual part coming from the lexicon (the content of substantive words being concepts), the structural part coming from the syntax. It is typically propositionally underspecified (so a conceptual schema or blueprint) and will have multiple propositional realizations dependent on the pragmatics of different contexts of use Wilson, 1986/1995;Carston, 2002Carston, , 2015Wilson and Sperber, 2004;Hall, 2008Hall, , 2009i.a.). The central theme of the current paper is that the code has two quite distinct parts: syntax (the computational engine) and lexicon (a stored/memorized set of conventionalized phonologymeaning pairings), the one a component of the narrow language faculty, the other a component of language broadly construed, a part of the conceptual-intentional mental systems.…”

Explicit Import Revisited: A Critical Appraisal of Explicatures

“…This kind of overgeneration argument is refuted by relevance theorists. Carston (2002cCarston ( , 2004aCarston ( , 2009, Hall (2008aHall ( , 2008bHall ( , 2009, and Carston and Hall (2012) rebut the charges mounted against free enrichment by the proponents of hidden-indexicals by showing that the purported overgeneration problem ensues from a major misconception about free enrichment. As is expounded by the scholars, on the one hand, only enrichments that produce manifestly speaker-intended and contextually relevant cognitive effects can be generated in the course of recovering explicatures, which -in normal circumstances -rules out the derivation of (7a) from (7), and (8b) from (8).…”