Blutner, Hendriks, and de Hoop on Compositionality

Reinhard Blutner, Petra Hendriks, and Helen de Hoop. “A New Hypothesis on Compositionality”:http://odur.let.rug.nl/~hendriks/sydney03.pdf. Paper to be presented at the 4th International Conference on Cognitive Science, Sydney, Australia, July 13-17, 2003.

bq. Abstract In this paper we put forward a new hypothesis on compositionality of meaning, namely that compositionality is bidirectional optimization. Underspecification approaches to natural language interpretation generally start with an underspecified or weak meaning, which is strengthened by contextual information. In contrast, the bidirectional optimization approach we advocate proceeds from the strongest possible meaning. This meaning can be changed or weakened by contextual information. Under this approach, the meaning of an utterance is composed in a functional rather than a concatenative way. Hence, this approach avoids a number of well-known empirical problems associated with concatenative compositionality.