Dag Westerståhl: Compositionality in context

The standard notion of compositionality is well understood, and the formal framework of Hodges (2001) allows precise treatment of various features of compositionality. The issue in this talk is how context-dependence, i.e. cases where semantic values are assigned to syntactic expressions *in contexts*. Contexts here can be assignments, utterance situations (or features thereof s.a. speakers, times, locations, possible worlds,...), standards of precision, etc., or various aspects of linguistic context. Currying the context argument results in a function taking only expressions as arguments, and one question concerns the relation between compositionality of the curried function and that of the uncurried one. Another question is the relation between a compositional semantics and one given by a standard inductive truth definition. The background to these questions is linguistic, but in this talk I focus on the mathematical details.