Context, Compositionality, and Brevity

Because of “arguments from the infinity of language”, compositionality is often seen as a ‘non-negotiable’ feature of any theory of the semantics of natural language. But there are a number of features of “ordinary language discourse” that make it seem that compositionality is not true of natural language semantics. Some of these features are lumped together under the rubric of ‘context’, and it is often argued that these features cannot be given any compositional analysis. This paper explores a few of these features and arguments, with the idea that the evidence is not so clearcut against compositionality. However, at least one of the accounts of compositionality and context that endeavours to show their compatibility is lacking, and the paper explores a remedy for this. 1 Brevity–why bother? Intuitively, the title of this section offers two rather different questions: one is to query why we should be brief in our speech and the other is to question whether it is worthwhile (or even possible) to try to give an account of the fact that people exhibit brevity in speech. The title, in fact, exhibits a kind of brevity in posing these two different questions in just a few words. To answer the first of the two questions about this example of brevity, we might say such things as: we wanted to highlight the two aspects but they wouldn’t both fit as a section title, or that we wished to engage those who are only interested in one aspect into a discussion of both questions, and so on. In fact, perhaps we didn’t ourselves even notice, as we were composing the title, that it had these two aspects. And