Lexington Books
Pages: 242
Trim: 6½ x 9
978-1-4985-6272-0 • Hardback • June 2019 • $117.00 • (£90.00)
978-1-4985-6273-7 • eBook • June 2019 • $111.00 • (£85.00)
Eduardo García Ramírez is research fellow at the Institute for Philosophical Research of the National Autonomous University of Mexico.
Preface
1. Two Views of Language
2. The Closed View and Strong Compositionality
3. The Failure of Strong Compositionality
4. Open Compositionality and the Cognition First Methodology
5. Lexical Processing Architecture and Substitution Failure
6. Decoupled Representations and Empty Names
7. Moral Discourse, Moral Cognition and the Language Analogy
Bibliography
This book offers a completely new look at the traditional Principle of Compositionality and its power to account for the meaning of linguistic expressions. García Ramírez lucidly argues against what he calls 'Closed Compositionality,' i.e., the idea that the meaning of complex expressions in a given language is fully determined on the basis of its lexicon and syntactic/semantic axioms. From the author’s perspective, the interpretation of those expressions strongly depends on the different kinds of cognitive processes underlying their use. After a careful evaluation of recent discoveries in psycholinguistics and neurosciences, García Ramírez proposes an original alternative thesis, Open Compositionality, according to which complex linguistic expressions can only be adequately interpreted on grounds of a multifaceted decision-making procedure. Open Compositionality convincingly deploys the significant advantages for the study of natural language carried by this extraordinary methodological turn. It should be read by anyone interested in getting a clearer idea of how we are able to communicate with one another through language use.
— Eleonora Orlando, University of Buenos Aires