According to the neo-Gricean analysis presented in Chapter 8, word meaning is conventional cogitative speaker meaning. That is, what an expression means is determined by what idea people conventionally use it to directly express. This thesis works very well for individual words, stock phrases, dead metaphors, and idioms. “Green” means green only because it is conventional for English speakers to use the word “green” to mean the color green. The phrase “kicked the bucket” means “died” only because people conventionally use it to mean that. The basic neo-Gricean analysis does not, however, account for the constructive and recursive character of the semantic rules of a language. That is, the analysis does not account for the way in which the meaning of a complex word, phrase, clause, or sentence is normally determined by the meanings of its components. In this chapter we will account for the compositionality of linguistic meaning by adding a recursive element to the neo-Gricean analysis. This element is provided by the fact that there are conventions whereby word structures are used to express idea structures. We will address objections that have been leveled against the notion of compositionality, and argue that projection rules need not be restricted to block generation of “anomalous” meanings.

THE PRODUCTIVITY PROBLEM

The deficiencies of the neo-Gricean analysis can be seen most starkly by reflecting on the fact that every natural language contains a large – indeed, infinite – number of meaningful sentences that have never in fact been uttered.