Compositionality in a Parallel Architecture for Language Processing

Compositionality has been a central concept in linguistics and philosophy for decades, it is increasingly prominent many other areas of cognitive science. Its status, however, remains contentious. Here, I reassess the nature scope principle compositionality (Partee, 1995) from perspective psycholinguistics neuroscience. First, review classic arguments conclude that they fail to establish as property human language. Next, state new competence argument, acknowledging fact any competent user language L can assign most expressions at least one meaning which function only meanings expression's parts its syntactic structure. then discuss selected results neuroscience, indicating brain possesses processing capacities presupposed by argument. Finally, outline architecture consistent with neuroscience results, where semantic representations may be generated syntax-driven stream an “asyntactic” stream, jointly or independently. viewed constraint on computation former only.