Event Detail

Productivity, the ability to understand novel expressions, is often considered to be one of the distinctive characteristics of linguistic representational systems. In this talk, I complicate this picture by distinguishing a number of different kinds of productivity. I argue that virtually all iconic systems are productive, even when they are neither recursive nor combinatorial. There are also non-recursive language-based systems that exhibit a kind of finite productivity. The distinctive contribution of recursive semantic rules is the type of infinite but discrete productivity familiar from classical discussions of compositionality. I’ll argue that all forms of productivity stem from the application of general rules to novel cases, but that different kinds of general rules result in different forms of productivity.