Dublin Philosophy Blog

The principle of semantic compositionality insists that the meanings of complex expressions be derivable from the meanings of their smaller parts. For example, it insists that the meaning of the phrase, ‘the white horse’ be a function of the meanings of ‘the’ ‘white’ and ‘horse’, although that is not to say that ‘the’ has to stand for anything.

Compositionality is a feature of formal languages, but I don’t think natural languages are compositional. (This is not to deny that it would be good if they were. There are good reasons for wanting natural languages to be compositional, such as the ready explanation that would provide of how speakers with finite mental resources could learn to understand a potentially indefinitely large corpus of sentences of their language.) Also, I don’t deny that natural languages are syntactially compositional, that is, I don’t deny that new sentences are composed of recurring vocabulary from the language. What I deny is that once you have the parts and the way they’re put together, you have thereby determined the truth conditions of the resultant sentence.

I don’t think natural languages are compositional because I think the composition of meaningful parts into larger phrases is always heavily contextually dependent. So the meaning of the resultant phrases is not a function of the meanings of the parts (and the way they’re put together).

Consider the label of a bottle of honey recently purchased at Tescos.

The label says ‘squeezy pure clear honey’. It is beyond question that ‘squeezy’ ‘pure’ and ‘clear’ all modify ‘honey’, judging by grammatical structure. But now think about the meaning.

It’s also beyond question that the manufacturer intends by ‘squeezy honey’, honey in a squeezy bottle. But what does the phrase ‘squeezy honey’ itself mean? Speakers sometimes use phrases to mean things that the phrases themselves don’t, strictly, mean (Kripke 1977). I contend that whatever else it might have meant in different circumstances, when it occurs, as it does, on a bottle of honey, the phrase itself means ‘honey in a squeezy bottle’ just like the manufacturer/speaker and the shopper all understand it to mean. After all, if you put the same honey in a glass jar it wouldn’t be squeezy anymore although it would retain exactly those properties responsible for its being squeezy when it’s in a squeezy bottle. If ‘squeezy’ picked out a physical dispositional property of the honey the same way the same way ‘sweet’ and ‘clear’ do, we could continue to call it squeezy even in other containers, since it retains its physical and dispositional properties in other containers.

So it seems to me that ‘squeezy + noun’ applies to nouns differently depending on the context. ‘squeezy + bottle’ describes a physical dispositional state of the bottle. A bottle is squeezy when it can be squozen, that is, more or less, when it changes its shape in response to external pressure and returns to its original shape when the pressure is eased. A glass jar doesn’t have this disposition. ‘squeezy + honey’ means fluid honey in an elastic, squeezy bottle.

A mainstream semanticist might say we’re dealing with homonymy here. There are actually two similarly spelled words, squeezy_1 and squeezy_2, where squeezy_1 refers to the elastic disposition of certain objects and squeezy_2 refers to the property true of certain fluid substances in elastic containers. That certainly preserves the theory in the face of the example. But that’s a bit dire. Positing hitherto unnoticed ambiguity is a universal solvent.

The mechanism I prefer to see in operation sees ‘squeezy’ take its most expected reading of (roughly) ‘elastic’ and ‘honey’ likewise and when it finds them combined, searches round for a plausible candidate meaning in the context. Imagine honey can be mixed with a rubberising compound that returns it to its original shape after squeezing. In this context we might be happy calling it squeezy honey (although it wouldn’t go nearly so well on toast). In this context, the mechanism decides ‘squeezy honey’ is honey with an elastic disposition. In our context the mechanism decides it means ‘honey in a bottle with an elastic disposition’.

Of course, the ‘mechanism;’ is just us speakers and our on the fly interpretation. I’m happy to say that there is nothing that ‘squeezy’ and ‘honey’ and indeed other words determinately mean before they’re resolved into something with practical application in a suitable context.

Incidentally, the manufacturer of Oaklane squeezy pure honey isn’t the only user to use ‘squeezy honey’ this way. Here is another photo taken in Lidl.

References
Saul Kripke 1977. “Speaker’s Reference and Semantic Reference”, Midwest Studies in Philosophy 2:255–276.