compositionality-strong-vs-weak

IN premisesummaries/2026/08/24/wiki-Principle_of_compositionality.md

Created 2026-08-25T02:58:50+00:00

Strong compositionality requires meaning be determined by immediate parts and a top-level syntactic function; weak compositionality requires the complete hierarchical syntactic combination.

Summary

The key fork here is whether a meaning function only needs to see the pieces directly in front of it plus one top-level rule, or whether it must account for the entire nested tree of how everything was assembled. This determines how much structural context a system can rely on when assigning meaning, and it shapes whether local, modular reasoning is sufficient or whether the full syntactic history must be carried along.