Interpreted Languages and Compositionality

This book argues that languages are composed of sets of signs , rather than strings . This notion, first posited by de Saussure in the early 20th century, has for decades been neglected by linguists, particularly following Chomsky s heavy critiques of the 1950s. Yet since the emergence of formal semantics in the 1970s, the issue of compositionality has gained traction in the theoretical debate, becoming a selling point for linguistic theories.
Yet the concept of compositionality itself remains ill-defined, an issue this book addresses. Positioning compositionality as a cornerstone in linguistic theory, it argues that, contrary to widely held beliefs, there exist non-compositional languages, which shows that the concept of compositionality has empirical content. The author asserts that the existence of syntactic structure can flow from the fact that a compositional grammar cannot be delivered without prior agreement on the syntactic structure of the constituents.