Compositionality

Compositionality is the principle that the meaning of a complex expression is fully determined by its structure and the meanings of its constituents. As Szabó puts it, once we fix what the parts mean and how they are put together, there is no more leeway regarding the meaning of the whole. It is a fundamental presupposition of most contemporary work in semantics, even though it is rarely acknowledged in discussions of semantics within biblical studies.

In a sense the principle is indisputable, because some degree of compositionality is required for language to work at all. The sentence the bear escaped from the zoo is understood partly because the word bear is understood; if that word were unknown, the whole sentence would be opaque. Anyone learning a new language knows the experience of failing to grasp a sentence because one crucial word is missing. That failure shows that each word must contribute something to the whole.

Against Pure Context-Dependence

The principle has met pushback from those who prefer to treat words as wholly context-dependent. Words are context-sensitive to a degree, but that does not mean they contribute nothing. Denying any fixed contribution leads to a circularity: if bear means "bear" only in a given context, then context determines its meaning, but the context's meaning is set by the other words, whose meanings are in turn set by the context. The result is an infinite loop. A stable contribution from each word is what breaks it.

The Syntax-Semantics Interface

Compositionality has two halves: knowing the meanings of the components and knowing how they are put together. The second half is the syntax-semantics interface, the recognition that syntax and semantics interact, so that where morphemes sit in a structure affects interpretation.

A standard objection is idioms. Kick the bucket means "die," yet its parts do not compose to that meaning. But the meaningful unit at stake can be longer than a word; idioms simply show that composition sometimes operates at the phrase level rather than the single-word level.

Two examples show composition at work. The bear escaped from the zoo is read as a single occurrence, but the bear escaped from the zoos, with a plural, is read habitually, as if the bear repeatedly escaped from many zoos. The tense-aspect marker escaped is identical in both; the habitual reading comes from the plural morpheme, so a correct analysis of the past tense here depends on having a semantics for the plural and understanding how the two interact. Position matters too: Quick, the bear escaped from the zoo is a call to action, while the bear escaped from the zoo quick says the bear escaped in a quick manner. The morphemes are the same; only their syntactic arrangement differs. Doing semantics thus requires doing some syntax.