UCL Working Papers in Linguistics 12 (2000)
Compositionality, innocence and the interpretation of NPs
GEORGE POWELL
Neale (1999) outlines a theory of meaning which he claims can account for a
range of problematic semantic data while respecting two intuitively plausible
constraints on semantic theory: compositionality and semantic innocence. In
this paper I argue that Neale’s theory, hindered as it is by its underlying
conception of the relation between language and thought, fails to satisfy the
criteria it sets for itself. Once this conception is abandoned, a new analysis
becomes available which accounts for the same semantic phenomena within a more
parsimonious framework, as well as respecting both compositionality and
semantic innocence, properly understood.
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