Direct Compositionality

This book examines the hypothesis of "direct compositionality" which requires that semantic interpretation proceed in tandem with syntactic combination. In the first extended discussion of the hypothesis for twenty years, contributors from both sides of the debate draw on examples from a wide range of languages and discuss the place of direct compositionality in generative grammar.

Chris Barker is Associate Professor of Linguistics at New York University. He has held positions at a number of universities, including 10 years at UCSD. His 1991 UCSC PhD thesis, Possessive Descriptions, was published in 1995 by CSLI, Stanford. He is the co-founder of semanticsarchive.net, and is co-editor of Oxford Surveys in Semantics and Pragmatics.

Pauline Jacobson is Professor of Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences at Brown University. She has also held visiting appointments at Ohio State University and Harvard University. Her books include The Nature of Syntactic Representation, co-edited with G. K. Pullum (Reidel,1982) and The Syntax of Crossing Conference Sentences (Garland, 1980); the latter is the publicaton of her 1977 Ph.D. dissertation (UC Berkeley). She is editor in chief of the journal Linguistics and Philosophy.