Compositionality and Complexity

Intervention de Peter Pagin dans le cadre du colloque "Contextualism and Compositionality".

Presentation
It is often claimed that contextualism – the view that context-sensitivity goes beyond indexicality and affects every natural language sentence – is incompatible with compositionality and threatens the project of building a systematic semantics for natural language. The aim of the conference is to assess that claim and to discuss other issues related to contextualism and compositionality.

"Compositionality and Complexity"
Compositionality is usually justified by appeal to the requirement of computability: language users are able to work out the meanings of new sentences, so meaning must be computable. However, computability only implies that the semantics is recursive, which in turn does not entail that it is compositional. Are there reasons to think that natural language semantics is both recursive and compositional? One possible such reason would be that compositionality minimizes the computational complexity of semantic interpretation. In this talk I will investigate the relation between compositionality and complexity.