Principle of compositionality

The Frege principle ( also: compositionality, Kompositionsregularität, functionality principle, Fregesches principle of meaning) is a semantic principle, according to which the meaning of a complex, that is composed of subexpressions expression ( as a set ) by the meanings of its parts and the nature of their assembly is determined. It is a basic assumption of the standard approaches to semantics. It is named after the German mathematician, logician and philosopher Gottlob Frege ( 1848-1925 ).

The compositionality leaves aware of what exactly is "meaning" under the term; the only assumption is that the atomic, that is not decomposable expressions have a lexical meaning.

Occasionally, even the narrower extensionality, which in addition to the general compositionality and the specific extensionality, called Frege principle or of compositionality. For representatives of extensionality, which abolished to each statement give an equivalent extensional statement, both principles ultimately fall together.

Application

• On record the semantic level, a set can be regarded as a complex expression whose meaning can be determined from the components, so the words and their meanings, and the way they are linked.
• In word- semantic level is also a word can be a complex expression, as in the following example build vocabulary through composition ( compound word, cf morphology). For example, can the subexpressions of the " grass " and " green " compound word " grass green " regarded as Determinativkompositum ( that is, the first part determines the semantically closer second ); in this case is calculated as the meaning of the complex expression: green as grass.
• Usually compositional, often extensional semantics are positioned for formal languages ​​. For example, there is the "meaning", that is, the value of a mathematical formula, such as " 3 2 " from the meanings (ie values ​​) of the sub-expressions and the nature of their composition: the two sub-expressions " 3" and " 2 " by the character " " is connected, that is, the overall meaning is the result of the addition of 3 and 2

Boundaries and criticism

Just be on the word semantic level often ask the question in natural language and rarely clear beyond any doubt whether an expression is it ever made complex or not is a completely idiomatisierte form whose internal structure can not be semantically analyzed.

In a pragmatic perspective, the compositionality appears inadequate. It lacks the integration of the word as the sentence meanings " in understanding situations and contexts of knowledge (s) ". The model of compositionality would be " the true functioning of language- based communication is not (or only partially ) meet ." The principle of a failed bar " word - insulating structuralist semantics " Feed and oblivious to the " textual embedding ".