Pure quotation and general compositionality

Peter Pagin (1) , Dag Westerståhl (1, 2)

1 Department of Philosophy, Linguistics, and Theory of Science
2 Department of Philosophy

Starting from the familiar observation that no straightforward treatment of pure quotation can be compositional in the standard (homomorphism) sense, we introduce , which can be described as compositionality that takes linguistic context into account. A formal notion of linguistic is developed, allowing the context type of a complex expression to be distinct from those of its constituents. We formulate natural conditions under which an ordinary meaning assignment can be non-trivially extended to one that is sensitive to context types and satisfies general compositionality. As our main example we work out a Fregean treatment of pure quotation, but we also indicate that the method applies to other kinds of context, e.g. intensional contexts.

Mots clés: Quotation; Compositionality; General Compositionality; Linguistic context

Domaines: Linguistique

Peter Pagin, Dag Westerståhl. Pure quotation and general compositionality. Linguistics and Philosophy, 2011, 33 (5), pp.381-415. ⟨10.1007/s10988-011-9083-8⟩. ⟨hal-00686247⟩