On the Nature of Reverse Compositionality

Author: Johnson, Kent

Source: Erkenntnis, Volume 64, Number 1, January 2006 , pp. 37-60(24)

Publisher: Springer

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Abstract:

Reverse Compositionality (RC) is the thesis that one understands a complex expression only if one understands its parts. I argue that this thesis is false for natural languages. I then argue that the phenomenon that motivates the thesis is more likely to be a fact about human sentence-processing than linguistic understanding per se. Finally, I argue that RC is not useful in the debates about prototype-style theories of concepts in which it figures heavily.

Document Type: Research article

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10670-005-0362-z

Affiliations: 1: Email: johnsonk@uci.edu

Publication date: 2006-01-01