The Live Principle of Compositionality

In this paper I argue that the principle of compositionality should be thought of as a principle that applies to the live meanings of constituent expressions. Under such a conception of the principle contextualist findings in the philosophy of language can be handled in an intuitive and non-trivial way. Several cases, most of them known from the semantics literature, are addressed in order to illustrate the presence of live meanings. The live principle also grounds a so-called interference principle, that is used as a methodological tool for a fair judgement of proposed semantic explanations of various intricate linguistic phenomena.