Informativeness Constraints and Compositionality

In this paper we examine the role that compositional mechanisms and lexical semantics play in the determination of informativeness at the phrasal and clausal level. While the computation of the “relevance” of an utterance is largely determined by pragmatic factors (such as quantity), we argue that phrasal informativeness can, in many cases, be computed compositionally and independently of pragmatics. To illustrate this, we focus on the well-documented contrast between predicative and derived participial modificational constructions in English (build a house results in well-formed sentences, while *a built house does not). In our analysis, informativeness within an NP is computed in terms of minimal model generation (Blackburn and Bos, 2008), using the semantics associated with the qualia of the head noun; that is, modification is informative whenever a qualia value is not satisfied in all models.