On the Possibility of Compositional Pragmatics Peter Lasersohn University of Illinois 1. Introduction. The question we were asked to consider for this workshop is whether contextualism — understood as the claim that context-sensitivity goes beyond indexicality and affects every natural language sentence — is incompatible with compositionality, and threatens the project of building a systematic semantics for natural language. There are two ways of taking this question. One is to focus on the issue of compatibility: Assuming context-sensitivity is pervasive, what does that mean for compositionality? The other is to focus on this issue of whether contextualism is well supported: Assuming that contextualism is incompatible with compositionality, are the arguments for it strong enough to pose a real threat? In this paper I will take the first approach, set aside the issue of just how context-sensitive interpretation really is, and consider the question of whether there is an incompatibility between pervasive context-sensitivity and compositional interpretation in the first place. I will argue that there isn’t any such incompatibility, at least if we understand compositionality in one fairly standard way, namely as a principle that interpretation be assigned homomorphically, and construe this as a constraint on structural patterns in the language, rather than a model of what mental procedures people actually perform as they are interpreting each other’s utterances. More specifically: • We should carefully distinguish between the question of how a grammar assigns interpretations, and the question of how people figure out what interpretation the grammar assigns; • The fact that people must rely on pragmatics in the latter task does not show that interpretation is assigned non-compositionally; • The claim that interpretation is assigned homomorphically is equivalent to a familiar substitutivity principle — implying that counterexamples must have a certain form, and that arguments against compositionality must address the intuition underlying the substitutivity principle; • Thoroughgoing contextual effects on truth conditions can be handled compositionally in a grammar if that grammar is allowed to invoke pragmatic concepts; this does not mean that the grammar must explain pragmatic concepts, or do all the work of a pragmatic theory. 2. Contextual effects and the semantics/pragmatics “hand-off.” Why would we think that pervasive context-sensitivity threatens compositionality in the first place? I actually don’t know of any arguments that have been given specifically and explicitly just against compositionality based on contextualism. The arguments that I am familiar with are not so tightly focused against