Routledge Dictionary of Language and Linguistics.pdf

A-Z 943principle of compositionality (also Frege’sprinciple of meaning, Fregean principle)Principle usually ascribed to G.Frege (1848–1925) according to which the wholemeaning of a sentence can be described according to the functional interdependency ofthe meanings of its well-formed parts. The methodological premise, that the semanticdescription of complex expressions in natural language can be conceived such that themeaning of these expressions (in particular sentences) can be reconstructed from themeanings of their individual elements and their syntactic relationship to one another, isbased upon this empirical assumption. To this extent, the application of the principle ofcompositionality 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 arebased on the principle of compositionality.ReferencesFrege, G. 1962. Funktion, Begriff, Bedeutung, ed. G. Patzig. Göttingen. (4th edn 1975.)Partee, B.H. 1984. Compositionality. In F.Landman and F.Veltman (eds), Varieties of the FourthAmsterdam Colloquium, September 1982. Dordrecht. 281–311.Seuren, P.A.M. 1985. Discourse semantics. Oxford.categorial grammar, formal logic, intensional logic, Montague grammarprinciple of cyclic rule applicationA provision for the repeated application of transformations in transformationalgrammar. According to the principle of cyclic rule application, syntactic andphonological rules operate from bottom to top, i.e. they begin on the lowest level of thetree diagram and then move to the next highest level until they reach the highest cyclicnode, the matrix sentence. The application of a cyclic rule within a cyclic node assumesthat no other cyclic rules have been applied to a higher cyclic node. According to the goalof formulating universal restrictions for the grammars of all natural languages, Chomsky(1968) postulated that the cyclic principle was an inherent organizational principle ofuniversal grammar. In syntactic theory, trace theory has shown that the empiricalpredictions of the cyclic principle can also be derived from other constraints ontransformations (see Freidin 1978). In phonology as well there are attempts to replacethe cyclic principle with other restrictions (see Kiparsky 1982). ( alsotransformational grammar)