Abstract

tracting away from contingent aspects of the channel's physical realization and from the use of the information by the recipient. For instance, the finiteness of language processors demands that the meanings of sufficiently complex signs be a function of the meanings of their parts: thus compositionality. Without additional constraints, compositionality could be trivially satisfied (Zadrozny 1994). But the fact that language users derive their implicit contract for sign meaning from finite evidence imposes strong uniformity requirements on signs. While this argument has not, to my knowledge, been made rigorous through an axiomatic treatment, type-logical grammar offers a promising notion of uniformity: to say, for instance, that a sign c meaning z has type B/A is to say that c + a (where + is a suitable sign combination operator) has type B and means z(x), given that a has type A and means x. But uniformity must also go backwards, if the use and meaning of a sign is to be induced from

Citations