On the Nature of Reverse Compositionality


Συγγραφέας: Kent Johnson


Kent Johnson: On the Nature of Reverse Compositionality (pdf, 24 pages)
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 prototypestyle theories of concepts in which it figures heavily.