ABSTRACT
Principle usually ascribed to G.Frege (1848-1925) according to which the whole meaning of a sentence can be described according to the functional interdependency of the meanings of its well-formed parts. The methodological premise, that the semantic description of complex expressions in natural language can be conceived such that the meaning of these expressions (in particular sentences) can be reconstructed from the meanings of their individual elements and their syntactic relationship to one another, is based upon this empirical assumption. To this extent, the application of the principle of compositionality presupposes a syntactic analysis and yields, in the case of sentences, their sentence meanings but not the utterance meanings ( meaning, utterance). Possible problems with the principle of compositionality may be evident in idioms, metaphors, and intensionality. Categorial grammar and Montague grammar are based on the principle of compositionality.
