compositional
English
Etymology
From composition + -al.
Adjective
compositional (comparative more compositional, superlative most compositional)
- Of or pertaining to composition.
- The compositional aspects of this work are less than ideal.
- (linguistics) Being the sum of its parts.
- The phrase "sum of its parts" is entirely compositional.
- 1979, Edward S. Klima & Ursula Bellugi, The Signs of Language, page 202:
- A wet súit meaning a suit that is wet is a compositional phrase; a wét suit meaning a garment worn by skin divers is a compound.
- 2003, Jean Boase-Beier & Ken R. Lodge, The German Language: A Linguistic Introduction, page 153:
- We have already noted that compounds tend to have meanings that are not entirely compositional and would therefore need to be listed.
- 2004, Sergei Nirenburg & Victor Raskin, Ontological Semantics, page 106:
- Sentence meaning is compositional because, to a large extent, it depends on a combination of the meanings of sentence constituents, which implies the concept of semantic structure.
Derived terms
- compositionality
- compositionally