compositionality

In mathematics, semantics, and philosophy of language, the Principle of Compositionality is the principle that the meaning of a complex expression is determined by the meanings of its constituent expressions and the rules used to combine them. The principle of compositionality states that in a meaningful sentence, if the lexical parts are taken out of the sentence, what remains will be the rules of composition. Take, for example, the sentence "Socrates was a man". Once the meaningful lexical items are taken away - "Socrates" and "man" - what is left is the pseudo-sentence, "S was a M". The task becomes a matter of describing what the connection is between S and M.
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Representations may be said to be compositional insofar as they retain the same meaning across diverse contexts. Thus, "kick" means the same thing in the context of "-the ball", "- a rock", and "- a dog", although it changes meaning in the context of "- the bucket". One might say that according to the principle of the compositionality of representations atomic representations make the same semantic contribution in every context in which they occur. See systematicity , productivity , symbolicism .
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