COMPOSITION AND SYNTAX

Evidently, if natural generativity is the hallmark of iconicity, there is no place for a grammar or syntax of pictures. Grammatical rules tell us how to compose whole sentences from items of the lexicon that have had their significance bestowed upon them by convention. It is by convention that the marks which express various logical operations, such as conjunction and disjunction, express those operations and not others. It is by convention that referring terms and predicates have been granted respectively their referents and their satisfaction conditions. Given the conventional interpretations of the lexical items in a sentence, and given rules of grammar, the interpretation of the whole sentence is fixed. No further conventional stipulation is required to determine the sense of the sentence.

This feature of natural languages we may call ‘compositionality’. Compositionahty is what allows us to generate and communicate with hordes of novel sentences; it is what allows us to interpret and cope with the flood of sentential novelty that daily washes over us. Compositionahty is only necessary and not by itself sufficient for the fecundity and flexibility of natural language. For example, the Conference dot system introduced in chapter 2 is compositional, but its grammar and lexicon are severely restricted and parasitic on a linguistic environment. The dots represent participants (indexed by numbers on dots and lists of names) and the rectangle represents a table. The only well-formed statements of the system consist of putting dots around the rectangle.