Rethinking Compositionality

Online conference by Uli Sauerland, Research Director at Leibniz-Centre General Linguistics in Berlin and PARIS IAS fellow for one-month writing residency in November 2025 as part of the "Paris IAS Ideas" series.

The Paris IAS Ideas online lecture series offers short, stimulating presentations by researchers from the Paris Institute for Advanced Study, marking the start of their month-long writing residency.

Session exclusively online and in English.
Free upon registration.
Registration is required via the form at the bottom of the page to receive the connection link.

Presentation 

In human language and cognition, words and concepts are basic units of meaning that we combine to form more complex meanings. While some combinations are simple juxtapositions – as in ‘The weather is nice. It's cold.’ – others are based on deeper, non-trivial mechanisms of composition. Thus, a sentence such as ‘The weather is not nice’ cannot be reduced to the simple addition of ‘The weather is nice’ and its negation.

This presentation proposes to rethink the nature of this non-trivial composition of meaning, based on a renewed formal approach at the crossroads of linguistics, logic and cognitive science.