Assertoric Content and General Compositionality

Abstract

    It is a common view in formal semantic theories that the compositional semantic values of sentences in contexts are identical to the assertoric contents expressed by these sentences. Recently, however,there have been challenges to this simple view on the basis of difficulties in theorizing various ‘shifty’ phenomena. In this paper, I argue that these difficulties can be ‘explained away’ by introducing a revised notion of compositionality which allows an expression to have different semantic values in different environments. I then claim that the proposed framework can be not only compatible with the identity but also plausible as a natural language semantics.