compositional
adj/ˌkɒm.pəˈzɪ.ʃən.əl/
Etymology From composition + -al.
1
Of or relating to composition.
- The compositional aspects of this work are less than ideal.
2
Human sciences, Linguistics, Sciences Being the sum of its parts.
- The phrase "sum of its parts" is entirely compositional.
- 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.1979, Edward S. Klima, Ursula Bellugi, The Signs of Language, page 202:
3 more examples
- We have already noted that compounds tend to have meanings that are not entirely compositional and would therefore need to be listed.2003, Jean Boase-Beier, Ken R. Lodge, The German Language: A Linguistic Introduction, page 153:
- 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.2004, Sergei Nirenburg, Victor Raskin, Ontological Semantics, page 106:
- To cite a textbook example, white house and White House are both written with internal spaces, but the first is argued to be a phrase because it is semantically compositional and has phrase-final stress, while the latter is argued to be a word because it has noncompositional semantics and compound-initial stress.James Myers, Wordhood and Disyllabicity in Chinesehttps://web.archive.org/web/20221006165522/http://www.ccunix.ccu.edu.tw/~lngmyers/Myers_Ch3_WordsDisyl_Chapter.pdf
- Derived terms
- compositional grammar, compositionalism, compositionalist, compositionality, compositionally, noncompositional, non-compositionality, precompositional, subcompositional, thermocompositional