The Combinatorics of Salva Veritate Principles
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Various concepts of grammatical compositionality arise in many theories of both natural and artificial languages, and often play a key role in accounts of the syntax-semantics interface. We propose that many instances of compositionality should entail non-trivial combinatorial claims about the expressive power of languages which satisfy these compositional properties. As an example, we present a formal analysis demonstrating that a particular class of languages which admit salva vertitate substitutions - a property which we claim to be a particularly strong example of compositional principle - must also satisfy a very natural combinatorial constraint identified in this paper.
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