composicionalidad

Composicionalidad, or compositionality, is a principle in semantics and philosophy of language stating that the meaning of a complex expression is determined by the meanings of its parts and the rules used to combine them. This idea provides a systematic link between the syntax of an utterance and its semantic interpretation, enabling the meaning of larger expressions to be computed from smaller ones.

Historically, the principle is often associated with Gottlob Frege, and it has been developed and formalized in modern formal semantics and Montague grammar. In practice, compositional semantics models meanings as functions: the meaning of a sentence arises from the meanings of its constituents and the compositional rules that combine them. For example, the meaning of a sentence like “John loves Mary” is obtained by applying the function represented by “loves” to the meanings of “John” and “Mary.”

There are degrees of compositionality. Strong compositionality holds that every expression’s meaning is fully determined by its parts and their combination, while weak or contextual forms allow additional interpretation factors such as world knowledge or pragmatic inference. Non-compositional phenomena, such as idioms (kick the bucket) or certain contextual expressions, challenge strict compositional accounts and motivate refinements to the theory.

Applications of compositionality span linguistics, formal semantics, and related fields, influencing how languages are modeled, learned, and processed by machines. It remains a central and debated assumption in analyzing how meaning is built from linguistic structure.