Compositionality and Concepts in Linguistics and Psychology

Abstract

One of the defining traits of language is its capacity to mediate between concepts in our mind, which encapsulate generalizations, and the things they refer to in a given communicative act, with all their idiosyncratic properties. This arti- cle examines precisely this interplay between conceptual and referential aspects of meaning, and proposes that concept composition (or concept combination, a term more commonly used in Psychology) exploits both: Conceptually afforded compo- sition is at play when amodifier and its head fit as could be expected given the prop- erties of the two concepts involved, whereas in referentially afforded composition the result of the composition depends on specific, independently available properties of the referent. For instance, red box tends to be applied to boxes whose surface is red, but, given the appropriate context, it can also be applied to e.g. a brown box that contains red objects.We support our proposal with data fromnominal modification, and explore a way to formally distinguish the two kinds of composition and inte- grate them into a more general framework for semantic analysis. Along the way, we recover the classically Fregean notion of sense as including conceptual information, and showthe potential of distributional semantics, a framework that has become very influential in Cognitive Science and Computational Linguistics, to address research questions from a theoretical linguistic perspective.