L'enunciato come sistema. Il principio di composizionalità e i suoi limiti

In this paper two different thesis are defended. On one hand, it is argued that the compositionality principle is necessary in order to understand how natural languages work. Without the bottom-up compositional processes we would not be able to understand sentences we have never heard before. On the other hand, the radical interpretations of the compositionality principle are untenable: some features of natural languages can be accounted for only if the context determines the meaning of an element in a typical top-down process.