How to Stop Worrying About Compositionality

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How to Stop Worrying About Compositionality

The ability to understand and generate novel sentences is the primary hallmark of human languages. Linguists refer to this phenomenon as the productivity of language, and they posit a specific mechanism as the driving force of that phenomenon: compositionality.

This post will review the tenets of classic work on compositionality, and to highlight how each theory has evolved to match particular theoretical positions about the nature of language.