Dear all,

Next week Wednesday (April 26^th), Matej Drobňák will give a presentation during the lunch seminar titled ‘Compositionality, communication, and commitments’. You can find the abstract of his talk below.

The meeting takes place in E15.39/41 from 12.30 – 13.30, and can be screened via the following Zoom link: https://radbouduniversity.zoom.us/j/84273872756?pwd=UDFETEE0L2hJS1ptZDR3aXNXK2hPQT09.

Have a nice weekend!

All the best,

Nina

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Compositionality, communication, and commitments

In recent years, we can see a growth of an interest in the Rich Meaning Approaches (RMA), i.e. in the approaches which understand the meanings of words as rich conceptual structures comprised of meaning components (such as Pustejovsky’s generative lexicon). The standard motivation for RMA lies in compositionality as rich meanings seem to be indispensable for explaining many phenomena involved in the composition of the semantic content of a sentence.

The general aim of this paper is to make connections between RMA and Brandom’s inferentialism. On the one hand, I argue that recognizing inferentialism as a member of RMA can be beneficial for inferentialism, because it can help inferentialists to tackle the problem of compositionality. On the other hand, I argue that inferentialism can provide a) an additional motivation for RMA by recognizing the indispensable role of rich meanings in communication and b) an original approach to explaining certain compositional phenomena discussed within RMA, demonstrated through the example of logical metonymy.