Editing Principle of compositionality (section)

== Critiques ==
The principle of compositionality has been the subject of intense debate. Indeed, there is no general agreement as to how the principle is to be interpreted, although there have been several attempts to provide formal definitions of it.<ref name="Szabó2012">Szabó, Zoltán Gendler (2012) "[https://web.archive.org/web/20130117194209/https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/compositionality/ Compositionality]". In Zalta, Edward N. (ed.). Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. First published Thu Apr 8, 2004; substantive revision Fri Dec 7, 2012</ref>

Scholars are also divided as to whether the principle should be regarded as a factual claim, open to [[empirical]] testing; an [[Logical truth|analytic truth]], obvious from the nature of language and meaning; or a [[methodology|methodological]] principle to guide the development of theories of syntax and semantics. The Principle of Compositionality has been attacked in all three spheres, although so far none of the criticisms brought against it have been generally regarded as compelling.{{citation needed|date=June 2021}} Most proponents of the principle, however, make certain exceptions for [[idiomatic]] expressions in natural language.<ref name="Szabó2012"/>

The principle of compositionality usually holds when only syntactic factors play in the increased complexity of [[sentence processing]], while it becomes more problematic and questionable when the complexity increase is due to sentence or discourse [[Context (language use)|context]], [[semantic memory]], or [[sensory cue]]s.<ref>Baggio et al. (2012), Conclusions.</ref> Among the problematic phenomena for traditional theories of compositionality is that of [[logical metonymy]], which has been studied at least since the mid 1990s by linguists [[James Pustejovsky]] and [[Ray Jackendoff]].<ref name="Chersoni2017">Chersoni, E., Lenci, A., & Blache, P. (2017, August). ''[https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01572187/ Logical metonymy in a distributional model of sentence comprehension]''. In Sixth Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics (* SEM 2017) (pp. 168-177).</ref><ref>James Pustejovsky. 1995. The Generative Lexicon. The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA</ref><ref>Ray Jackendoff. 1997. The Architecture of the Language Faculty. The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.</ref> Logical metonymies are sentences like ''John began the book'', where the verb ''to begin'' requires ([[subcategorization|subcategorizes]]) an event as its argument, but in a logical metonymy an object (i.e. ''the book'') is found instead, and this forces to interpret the sentence by inferring an implicit event ("reading", "writing", or other prototypical actions performed on a book).<ref name="Chersoni2017"/> The problem for compositionality is that the meaning of reading or writing is not present in the words of the sentence, neither in "begin" nor in "book".

Further, in the context of the philosophy of language, the principle of compositionality does not explain all of meaning. For example, you cannot infer [[sarcasm]] purely on the basis of words and their composition, yet a phrase used sarcastically means something completely different from the same phrase uttered straightforwardly. Thus, some theorists argue that the principle has to be revised to take into account linguistic and extralinguistic [[Context principle|context]], which includes the tone of voice used, common ground between the speakers, the intentions of the speaker, and so on.<ref name="Szabó2012"/>