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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. Euclid, Greek mathematician, 3rd century BC, known today as the father of geometry; shown here in a detail of The School of Athens by Raphael. ...
In the main, semantics (from the Greek and in greek letters σημαντικός or in latin letters semantikós, or significant meaning, derived from sema, sign) is the study of meaning, in some sense of that term. ...
Philosophy of language is the branch of philosophy that studies language. ...
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. A lexicon is a list of words together with additional word-specific information, i. ...
It is frequently taken to mean that every operation of the syntax should be associated with an operation of the semantics that acts on the meanings of the constituents combined by the syntactic operation. As a guideline for constructing semantic theories, this is generally taken, as in the influential work on the philosophy of language by Donald Davidson, to mean that every construct of the syntax should be associated by a clause of the T-schema with an operator in the semantics that specifies how the meaning of the whole expression is built from constituents combined by the syntactic rule. In some general mathematical theories (especially those in the tradition of Montague grammar) this guideline is taken to mean that the interpretation of a language is essentially given by a homomorphism between an algebra of syntactic representations and an algebra of semantic objects. Donald Davidson (March 6, 1917 – August 30, 2003) was an American philosopher and the Willis S. and Marion Slusser Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. ...
For other uses, see Syntax (disambiguation). ...
Convention T is the inductive definition that lies at the heart of any realisation of Alfred Tarskis semantic theory of truth, expressing the commutation of truth over logical operators. ...
In the main, semantics (from the Greek and in greek letters σημαντικός or in latin letters semantikós, or significant meaning, derived from sema, sign) is the study of meaning, in some sense of that term. ...
Montague grammar is an approach to natural language semantics, based on formal logic, especially lambda calculus and set theory. ...
In abstract algebra, a homomorphism is a structure-preserving map. ...
This principle is sometimes called Frege's Principle, because Frege is widely credited for the first formulation of it. This claim has also been disputed. Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege (November 8, 1848 - July 26, 1925) was a German mathematician, logician, and philosopher who is regarded as a founder of both modern mathematical logic and analytic philosophy. ...
The Principle of Compositionality also exists in a similar form in the compositionality of programming languages. In computer science, denotational semantics is an approach to formalizing the semantics of computer systems by constructing mathematical objects (called denotations or meanings) which express the semantics of these systems. ...
Critiques The principle of compositionality has been the subject of intense debate. Indeed, there is no general agreement as to how the principle is to be interpreted, although there have been several attempts to provide formal definitions of it.
Scholars are also divided as to whether the principle should be regarded as a factual claim, open to empirical testing; an analytic truth, obvious from the nature of language and meaning; or a methodological principle to guide the development of theories of syntax and semantics. The principle has been attacked in all three spheres, although so far none of the criticisms brought against it have been generally regarded as compelling. Most proponents of the principle, however, make certain exceptions for idiomatic expressions in natural language. Empirical is an adjective often used in conjunction with science, both the natural and social sciences, which means an observation or experiment based upon experience that is capable of being verified or disproved. ...
Analytic may refer to Analytic proposition or analytic philosophy, in philosophy Analytic geometry, analytic function, analytic continuation, analytic set in mathematics. ...
This article or section may contain original research or unverified claims. ...
An idiom is an expression whose meaning is not compositional — that is, whose meaning does not follow from the meaning of the individual words of which it is composed. ...
Further, in the context of the philosophy of language, the principle of compositionality does not explain all of meaning. For example, you cannot infer sarcasm purely on the basis of words and their composition, yet a phrase used sarcastically means something completely different from the same phrase uttered seriously. The principle of compositionality, then, has to be revised to take into account linguistic and extralinguistic context, which includes the tone of voice used, common ground between the speakers, the intentions of the speaker, and so on. Sarcasm is sneering, jesting, or mocking a person, situation or thing. ...
Look up Context in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ...
See also In computer programming, a referentially transparent function is one that, given the same parameter(s), always returns the same result. ...
In mathematics, an initial algebra is an initial object in the category of F-algebras for a given endofunctor F. Consider the endofunctor sending to . ...
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