Ad hoc concepts: atomic or decompositional?*

The meanings of words are frequently pragmatically modulated in context, so that the concept a word is used to communicate is different than what it encodes. In this short paper, I begin to consider the nature of these communicated, „ad hoc‟ concepts. I start from the assumption that the concepts encoded by monomorphemic lexical items are atomic – or, at least, that the stable concepts these lexical items are often used to communicate are – and assess whether it is plausible to maintain that genuinely ad hoc concepts are also atomic, or whether some variety of decompositional account is to be preferred.