Degrees of Compositionality (In the Realm of Idioms)

Abstract This paper outlines and motivates a degrees view of compositionality. The degrees view says that the meanings of complex natural language expressions are determined by the meanings and syntactic structure of their parts to varying degrees. The initial motivation for proposing such a view is that it solves a serious problem with the compositionality principle, which arises if the meanings of complex expressions are taken to be fully determined by the meanings and combinatorial structure of their parts. This seems to be the standard understanding of compositionality, but natural languages are ripe with expressions, whose meanings are compositionally underdetermined. This striking feature of natural languages is captured by the degrees view, which attributes an undiminished role to compositionality and proposes that complex expressions are generally compositional, albeit with varying intensity. In order to provide further motivation for the degree-theoretic perspective, this paper also examines the meta-semantics of idiomatic phrases, which are widely held to defy compositionality by definition. As predicted by the degrees view, the analysis reveals that there are different types of idiomatic phrases, some of which are more compositional than others.