ABSTRACT
Communication using true and false sentences is a given. At a metaphysically primary stage, there are just sentences and the possibility of communication with them. This primary stage is prior to all theory. At a secondary, theoretical stage, various derivations occur. First, we have a ‘horizontal’ division of the sentence into smaller linguistic components, especially words and morphemes. Secondly, in a ‘vertical’ dimension sentences and their semantically significant components are assigned meanings. These horizontal and vertical theoretical manoeuvres serve to model communication and in particular the creative use of language. The semantically significant components of sentences, and the meanings of all semantically significant entities, including sentences themselves, are, then, products of a distinctively theoretical move: they are theoretical posits. Meaning is governed by the context principle and by a principle of compositionality—in fact by two compositionality principles, a forwards and a reverse one, because as well as a functional dependence of the whole sentence on its semantically significant parts we must also recognize a dependence running in the opposite direction. The context principle, on the one hand, and the compositionality principles, on the other, might seem to be in tension with one another; but properly understood there is no clash.
