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Compositional
"Compositional" in a Sentence (6 examples)
The compositional aspects of this work are less than ideal.
The phrase "sum of its parts" is entirely compositional.
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.
We have already noted that compounds tend to have meanings that are not entirely compositional and would therefore need to be listed.
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.
To cite a textbook example, white house and White House are both written with internal spaces, but the first is argued to be a phrase because it is semantically compositional and has phrase-final stress, while the latter is argued to be a word because it has noncompositional semantics and compound-initial stress.
See also for "compositional"
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