compoziionale

Compoziionale refers to the property of compositionality in linguistics and philosophy of language, where the meaning of a complex expression is determined by the meanings of its parts and the way they are combined. The English equivalent is compositionality (and the Italian form is typically used in Italian-language scholarship). This principle underpins formal theories of semantics by linking syntactic structure to interpretation.

Historically, the idea is associated with Gottlob Frege, who argued that the meaning of a whole expression depends on its parts and the rule of composition. In modern semantics, compositionality is implemented with formal tools such as lambda calculus and Montague grammar, which provide explicit procedures for combining lexical meanings into larger structures. A standard illustration is a sentence like “John gave Mary a book,” whose meaning is constructed by applying the function expressed by “gave” to its arguments “John,” “Mary,” and “a book.”

The notion is not without limits. Some expressions are partly non-compositional, such as idioms (kick the bucket) or context-dependent readings where the interpretation shifts with discourse. Theories of compositionality therefore consider variants such as strong versus weak compositionality, and some approaches employ dynamic semantics to account for changes in context and information state.

Composizionale is a central concept in linguistics, influencing lexical semantics, the syntax–semantics interface, and the development of natural language processing models. It provides a framework for predicting interpretations, designing formal representations, and analyzing how meaning is built from smaller units in human language.