The compositionality of meaning and content

Representational systems such as language, mind, and possibly the brain are often viewed as compositional, meaning the semantic value of a complex representation arises from its parts and their arrangement. This principle, rooted in the late 19th century, has gained renewed interest. The two volumes aim to unify the diverse approaches to compositionality across various disciplines. They feature original papers that explore the topic from multiple contemporary perspectives, authored by an international array of psychologists, neuroscientists, computer scientists, linguists, and philosophers. The second volume specifically addresses compositionality within the sciences of language, the exploration of the mind, and the modeling of brain functions. Key questions include the evolution of compositional languages, the number of sentences required to learn such a language, and the relationship between compositionality and text interpretation, idiom generation, metaphor understanding, and aberrant expression comprehension. Additionally, it examines the psychological mechanisms that facilitate the combination of complex concepts and the neuronal structures that could support a compositional system of mental representations.