Compositionality

All human languages have the property of productivity. This is simply the fact that the vocabulary of any given language can be used to construct a theoretically infinite number of sentences (not all of which will be meaningful), by varying the ways in which the words are combined. For example, given the words the, a, has, eaten, seen, passing, contemporary, novelist and buffalo, the following figure among the large number of meaningful sentences that can be constructed:

and so on. (We can also construct ungrammatical sentences like A the novelist eaten passing has, but since these are meaningless we will ignore them here.) Most people have probably never heard (32) before:

yet, as speakers of English, we understand immediately what it means. How does this ability arise? One answer is that meaning is compositional. This is to say that the meanings of sentences are made up, or composed, of the meanings of their constituent lexemes. We understand novel sentences because we understand the meanings of the words out of which they are constructed. Since we know the individual meanings of there, are, no, remains, of, Indian, and so on, we know the meaning of any grammatical sentence in which they are combined. On the contrary, if a novel sentence contains a word which we do not know, we do not know what the sentence means. Thus, if you are told that the distribution of seats was aleatory, and you do not know that aleatory means ‘random’, then the sentence, taken as a whole, will not be meaningful. It is important to note that not all combinations of words are necessarily compositional. One especially important category of non-compositional phrase is idioms. For example, if I say that so-and-so has thrown in the towel, most English speakers will recognize that I am not talking about anyone literally ‘throwing’ a ‘towel’, but that I simply mean that the person in question has given up on what ever venture is being spoken about. The phrase throw in the towel, then, is not compositional, since its overall meaning, ‘to give up’, does not derive from the meanings of its individual component lexemes.

QUESTION In the following sentences, which of the highlighted expressions can be considered compositional, and which are idioms? Do any belong to some third category?

Based on the distinction between the meanings of words and the meanings of sentences, we can recognize two main divisions in the study of semantics: lexical semantics and phrasal semantics. Lexical semantics is the study of word meaning, whereas phrasal semantics is the study of the principles which govern the construction of the meaning of phrases and of sentence meaning out of compositional combinations of individual lexemes.

اخر الاخبار

اخبار العتبة العباسية المقدسة

قسم المعارف يواصل دعم الحركة الثقافية بإصدارات متنوِّعة عَبرَ معرض الكتاب الدائم

إقبال نسوي واسع على منافذ التبرع في العتبة العباسية المقدسة لدعم الشعبين الإيراني واللبناني

العتبة العباسية المقدسة تباشر تنفيذ المرحلة الثالثة من أعمال التوسعة

بمحافظة ذي قار.. قسم الشؤون الفكرية يقيم ندوة معرفية عن دور بصيرة العلماء في سلامة المجتمع

المزيد

الآخبار الصحية

سرّ بسيط لصحة القلب.. أطعمة تخفض الكوليسترول خلال أسابيع

سبب خفي لإعتام عدسة العين ؟

عوامل خفية تسرّع شيخوخة الدماغ

أسباب الرغبة الشديدة في تناول الحلويات والأطعمة النشوية

المزيد

الآخبار التكنلوجية

كندا تصنع كاسحة جليد من جيل جديد

رواد "أرتيميس 2" يكشفون تفاصيل حياتهم في الفضاء

حفريات صينية تكشف كائنات بحرية عاشت قبل 546 مليون عام

روسيا تطلق صاروخ "سويوز-2.1 إيه" من قاعدة بليسيتسك الفضائية

المزيد

مواضيع ذات صلة

Object language and metalanguage

Levels of meaning

Sense/reference/denotation/connotation

Meaning in French

What is semantics?

Change in meaning with no change in category

Change in category with no change in meaning

Anaphora vs. deixis

Grammatical case vs. semantic case

Semantic roles and Grammatical Relations Conclusion

Arguments and semantic roles

Semantic roles and Grammatical Relations