Compositional

Origin

From composition + -al.

Full definition of compositional

Adjective

1. Of or pertaining to composition.The compositional aspects of this work are less than ideal.
2. (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, 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, 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, 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