Abstract
Reverse Compositionality (RC) is the thesis that one understands a complex expression only if one understands its parts. I argue that this thesis is false for natural languages. I then argue that the phenomenon that motivates the thesis is more likely to be a fact about human sentence-processing than linguistic understanding per se. Finally, I argue that RC is not useful in the debates about prototype-style theories of concepts in which it figures heavily.
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Manuscript submitted 1 April 2004 Final version received 10 January 2005
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Johnson, K. On the Nature of Reverse Compositionality. Erkenntnis 64, 37–60 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-005-0362-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-005-0362-z