Compositionality. Szabó, Z. G. In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, Summer 2017 edition, 2017.
abstract   bibtex   
Anything that deserves to be called a language must contain meaningfulexpressions built up from other meaningful expressions. How are theircomplexity and meaning related? The traditional view is that therelationship is fairly tight: the meaning of a complex expression isfully determined by its structure and the meanings of itsconstituents—once we fix what the parts mean and how they areput together we have no more leeway regarding the meaning of thewhole. This is the principle of compositionality, a fundamentalpresupposition of most contemporary work in semantics., Proponents of compositionality typically emphasize the productivityand systematicity of our linguistic understanding. We can understand alarge—perhaps infinitely large—collection of complexexpressions the first time we encounter them, and if we understandsome complex expressions we tend to understand others that can beobtained by recombining their constituents. Compositionality issupposed to feature in the best explanation of these phenomena.Opponents of compositionality typically point to cases when meaningsof larger expressions seem to depend on the intentions of the speaker,on the linguistic environment, or on the setting in which theutterance takes place without their parts displaying a similardependence. They try to respond to the arguments from productivity andsystematicity by insisting that the phenomena are limited, and bysuggesting alternative explanations.
@incollection{Szabo2017,
  title = {Compositionality},
  booktitle = {The {{Stanford Encyclopedia}} of {{Philosophy}}},
  author = {Szab{\'o}, Zolt{\'a}n Gendler},
  editor = {Zalta, Edward N.},
  year = {2017},
  edition = {Summer 2017},
  publisher = {{Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University}},
  abstract = {Anything that deserves to be called a language must contain meaningfulexpressions built up from other meaningful expressions. How are theircomplexity and meaning related? The traditional view is that therelationship is fairly tight: the meaning of a complex expression isfully determined by its structure and the meanings of itsconstituents\textemdash once we fix what the parts mean and how they areput together we have no more leeway regarding the meaning of thewhole. This is the principle of compositionality, a fundamentalpresupposition of most contemporary work in semantics., Proponents of compositionality typically emphasize the productivityand systematicity of our linguistic understanding. We can understand alarge\textemdash perhaps infinitely large\textemdash collection of complexexpressions the first time we encounter them, and if we understandsome complex expressions we tend to understand others that can beobtained by recombining their constituents. Compositionality issupposed to feature in the best explanation of these phenomena.Opponents of compositionality typically point to cases when meaningsof larger expressions seem to depend on the intentions of the speaker,on the linguistic environment, or on the setting in which theutterance takes place without their parts displaying a similardependence. They try to respond to the arguments from productivity andsystematicity by insisting that the phenomena are limited, and bysuggesting alternative explanations.},
  file = {/Users/mmaldona/Zotero/storage/MQRHK3AK/compositionality.html}
}

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