The Compositionality of Meaning and Content, Vol.2: Applications to Linguistics, Psychology and Neuroscience (Linguistics & Philosophy)

Hardcover, x + 312 pages, NOT ex-library. Book looks unread, clean and bright throughout, with unmarked text, free of inscriptions and stamps, firmly bound. Published without a dust jacket. -- Representational systems such as language, mind and perhaps even the brain exhibit a structure that is often assumed to be compositional. That is, the semantic value of a complex representation is determined by the semantic value of its parts and the way they are put together. Dating back to the late 19th century, the principle of compositionality has regained wide attention recently. Since the principle has been dealt with very differently across disciplines, the aim of the two volumes is to bring together the diverging approaches. They assemble a collection of original papers 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. The second volume is devoted to issues of compositionality that arouse in the sciences of language, the investigation of the mind, and the modelling 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? -- Contents: 1. Compositionality and Language: -- Compositionality, Linguistic Evolution, and Induction by Minimum Description Length / Henry Brighton; Compositionality and Molecularism / Denis Bonnay; Compositionality, Aberrant Sentences and Unfamiliar Situations / Filip Buekens; Challenging the Principle of Compositionality in Interpreting Natural Language Texts / Françoise Gayral, Daniel Kayser & François Lévy; Compositionality in Plant Fixed Expressions / Shelley Ching-yu Hsieh, Chinfa Lien & Sebastian Meier; Type- and Token-Level Composition / Olav Mueller-Reichau; Compositionality and Contextuality as Adjoint Principles / Oleg Prosorov; 2. Compositionality and the Mind: -- Perspectives, Compositionality and Complex Concepts / Nick Braisby; Compositionality and the Pragmatics of Conceptual Combination / Fintan J. Costello & Mark T. Keane; The Goldilocks Scenario: Is Noun-Noun Compounding Compositional? / George Dunbar; Structured Thoughts: The Spatial-Motor View / Pierre Poirier & Benoit Hardy-Vallée; 3. Compositionality and the Brain: -- Learning Representations: How Stochastic Models Compose the World / Ralf Garionis; Neural Architectures of Compositionality / Frank van der Velde; Neuronal Synchronization, Covariation, and Compositional Representation / Markus Werning.