The Compositionality of Meaning and Content, Volume II, Applications to Linguistics, Psychology and Neuroscience (Linguistics & Philosophy)

The second volume is devoted to issues of compositionality that arouse in the sciences of language, the investigation of the mind, and the modeling of representational brain functions. How could compositional languages evolve? How many sentences are needed to learn a compositional language? How does compositionality relate to the interpretation of texts, the generation of idioms and metaphors, and the understanding of aberrant expressions? What psychological mechanism underlies the combination of complex concepts? And finally, what neuronal structure can possibly realize a compositional system of mental representations? Representational systems such as language, mind or brain, exhibit a structure that is widely assumed to be compositional, i.e., the semantic value of complex representations is determined by the semantic values of its parts. Dating back to the late nineteenth century, the principle of compositionality has recently regained wide attention. Since the way the principle has been dealt with differs across disciplines, the aim of these two volumes is to conjoin the diverging approaches. The editors have assembled a collection of original essays that cover the topic of compositionality from virtually all perspectives of interest in the contemporary debate. The well chosen international list of authors includes psychologists, neuroscientists, computer scientists, linguists and philosophers, among D. Bonnais; Johannes Brandl; Marc Breuer; David Byrd; Daniel Cohnitz; Malte Dahlgrn; Reinaldo Elugardo; Tim Fernando; Kenneth Gemes; Verena Gottschling; Pierre Jacob; Hannes Leitgeb; Menno Lievers; Alda Mari ; Jaume Mateu; Albert Newen; Jaroslav Peregrin; Ahti-Veikko Pietarinen; Kenneth Presting; Oleg Prosorov; Gerhard Schurz ; Finn Spicer; and Markus Werning. Markus Werning, Edouard Machery, and Gerhard Schurz are professors of philosophy at the Heinrich-Heine-University at Duesseldorf, Germany. Annotation Representational systems such as language, mindor brain, exhibit a structure that is widely assumed to be compositional, i.e., the semantic value of complex representations is determined by the semantic values of its parts. Dating back to the late nineteenth century, the principle of compositionality has recently regained wide attention. Since the way the principle has been dealt with differs across disciplines, the aim of these two volumes is to conjoin the diverging approaches. The editors have assembled a collection of original essays that cover the topic of compositionality from virtually all perspectives of interest in the contemporary debate. The well chosen international list of authors includes psychologists, neuroscientists, computer scientists, linguists and philosophers, among them: D. Bonnais; Johannes Brandl; Marc Breuer; David Byrd; Daniel Cohnitz; Malte Dahlgrn; Reinaldo Elugardo; Tim Fernando; Kenneth Gemes; Verena Gottschling; Pierre Jacob; Hannes Leitgeb; Menno Lievers; Alda Mari ; Jaume Mateu; Albert Newen; Jaroslav Peregrin; Ahti-Veikko Pietarinen; Kenneth Presting; Oleg Prosorov; Gerhard Schurz ; Finn Spicer; and Markus Werning Preface I COMPOSITIONALITY AND LANGUAGE Compositionality, Linguistic Evolution, and Induction by Minimum Description Length Compositionality and Molecularism Compositionality, Aberrant Sentences and Unfamiliar Situations Challenging the Principle of Compositionality in Interpreting Natural Language Texts Compositionality in Plant Fixed Expressions Type- and Token-Level Composition Compositionality and Contextuality as Adjoint Principles II COMPOSITIONALITY AND THE MIND Perspectives, Compositionality and Complex Concepts Compositionality and the Pragmatics of Conceptual Combination The Goldilocks Scenario: Is Noun-noun Compounding Compositional? Structured Thoughts: The Spatial-Motor View III COMPOSITIONALITY AND THE BRAIN Learning Representations: How Stochastic Models Compose the World Neural Architectures of Compositionality Neuronal Synchronization, Covariation, and Compositional Representation v. 1. Foundational issues v. 2. Applications to linguistics, psychology and neuroscience.