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2 - Compositionality

from Part I - Philosophy of Semantics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 October 2018

Zoltán Gendler Szabó  and
Richmond H. Thomason
Zoltán Gendler Szabó
Affiliation:
Yale University, Connecticut
Richmond H. Thomason
Affiliation:
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
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Summary

Following Willard V. O Quine and Donald Davidson, philosophers have sometimes suggested that semantic theories should aim at nothing more than assigning truth-conditions to the sentences in a compositional fashion, and the semantic values of subsentential expressions can be anything whatsoever that allows us to get the job done. This chapter argues that semanticists should take a less instrumental view towards the meanings of subsentential expressions and, consequently, that they need to say more about the function of referring expressions and quantifiers within the languages they interpret
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Philosophy of Language , pp. 41 - 63
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2018

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