Compositionality and Concepts in Linguistics and Psychology

James A. Hampton is a psychologist and cognitive scientist with a career-long interest in how people represent the concepts they use in everyday life. With an MA in Natural Sciences from the University of Cambridge and a PhD from University College London, he has been based at City, University of London since 1977 where he has been a Professor since 1997. He has published over 100 papers in peer-reviewed journals and edited books. His empirical work has contributed to our understanding of how people’s intuitive reasoning based on vaguely defined word meanings can leads to judgments which are at odds with the strict rules of logic. In this research he has engaged in collaborative work with colleagues from other cognitive sciences, including philosophy and linguistics. A particular interest has been the way in which vague concepts can be combined using logical operators such as conjunction, disjunction and negation.Yoad Winter is a linguist specializing in formal semantics. After obtaining his MSc in Computer Science and Mathematics from Tel-Aviv University, and PhD in Linguistics from Utrecht University, he was appointed as lecturer in Computer Science at Technion, Israel Institute of Technology. After having worked as an associate professor at Technion, he moved to Utrecht University in 2010, where he was appointed as a full professor in Semantics and Artificial Intelligence in 2014. Over the last twenty years he has published extensively in the area of formal semantics. His monograph Flexibility Principles in Boolean Semantics appeared with MIT Press (2001), and his advanced textbook Elements of Formal Semantics with Edinburgh University Press (2016). His main interests are plurality, logical operators in language, spatial expressions, computational reasoning and African drum languages.

• Introduction by James A. Hampton and Yoad Winter.- Cognitively Plausible Theories of Concept Composition by Lawrence W. Barsalou.- Compositionality and Concepts – A Perspective from Formal Semantics and Philosophy of Language by Francis Jeffry Pelletier.- Compositionality and Concepts by James A. Hampton.- Typicality Knowledge and the Interpretation of Adjectives by Choonkyu Lee.- Concept Typicality and the Interpretation of Plural Predicate Conjunction by Eva B. Poortman.- Critical typicality: Truth Judgements and Compositionality with Plurals and other Gradable Concepts by Yoad Winter.- Complement Coercion as the Processing of Aspectual Verbs: Evidence from Self-Paced Reading and fMRI by Yao-Ying Lai, Cheryl Lacadie, Todd Constable, Ashwini Deo, and Maria Mercedes Piñango.- Conceptual Combination, Property Inclusion, and the Aristotelian-Thomistic View of Concepts by Christina L. Gagné, Thomas L. Spalding, and Matthew Kostelecky.- Conceptual vs. Referential Affordance in Concept Composition by Louise McNally and Gemma Boleda.- How does the left Anterior Temporal Lobe Contribute to Conceptual Combination? Interdisciplinary Perspectives by Masha Westerlund and Liina Pylkkänen.- Dimension Accessibility as a Predictor of Morphological Gradability by Galit W. Sassoon.- Subject Index.- Name Index.