Compositionality, communication, and commitments.

In recent years, there has been increasing interest in Rich Meaning Approaches (RMA) that understand the meanings of words as rich conceptual structures, such as Pustejovsky’s generative lexicon. The reason for this is based on compositionality, as rich meanings have been shown to be indispensable for explaining conflict resolution in compositional processes. However, while the benefits of postulating rich meanings to explain conflict resolution are undeniable, the overall contribution of rich meanings to sentence comprehension has not yet been discussed. This paper aims to show that inferentialism counts as a version of RMA and that, once this is recognised, it can provide a robust rationale for the role of rich meanings in sentence comprehension. The rationale is based on the idea that rich meanings are indispensable for pragmatic purposes as they play a role in facilitating communication. As I argue, rich meanings not only assist in composing the semantic (truth-conditional) content of complete sentences, but also provide crucial information for determining the discursive commitments and entitlements established by utterances. Consequently, examining the implications of inferentialism for compositional processes a) offers new insights into their function and outputs and b) presents an alternative to the representationalist perspective on sentence comprehension. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]