The principle of compositionality is, essentially, the claim that the meaning of a sentence is determined by the meaning of its constituent parts (words and phrases) and the structure of those parts. This principle is often attributed to Gottlob Frege, but Indian philosophers have discussed versions of this principle and objections to it, as B. K. Matilal and P. K. Sen wrote years ago in Mind (1988, “The Context Principle and Some Indian Controversies over Meaning”).

After giving a talk at the University of Edinburgh’s Meaning Sciences Group on Kumārila’s philosophy of language, a few people in the audience wanted a succinct quotation of his commitment to compositionality to share with students. So, below is one, from his Tantravārttika (on Śabara’s Bhāṣya on Mīmāṃsāsūtra 2.1.46). The context is that he’s responding to an opponent (probably Bhartṛhari) who thinks the sentence is an indivisible meaning-bearing unit that’s responsible for our understanding a single, unified meaning. In reply, Kumārila argues that it isn’t the sentence or the sentence’s being a single thing that brings about this understanding, but rather word meanings and their combination:

But we understand a sentence meaning independently from the word’s function, just from the combination of each word’s own expressed meanings, word meanings that are independent of each other. In virtue of understanding this sentence meaning, we determine that this particular number of words are a single sentence. When we do this, we do not perceive any operation of the sentence or the sentence’s unitary nature.

yadā tu pṛthagbhūtair eva padair itaretaranirapeksaiḥ sveṣu padārtheṣūkteṣu tatsaṃsargād eva padavyāpārānapekṣo vākyārthapratyayo bhavati, tadvaśena ca tāvanti padāny ekaṃ vākyam ity avadhāryate, na tadā vākyatadekatvayor vyāpāraṃ paśyāmaḥ.

A word’s function is to denote a word meaning. The word “blue” denotes a meaning, as does the word “lotus.” In the sentence “This is a blue lotus,” “blue” and “lotus” denote their meanings independently. It is not that “blue” denotes its meaning in relationship to “lotus” or vice versa. This does not mean that words cannot have different referents in context. (Kumārila discusses extensively how nouns can acquire different meanings in context.) It does mean that there is some context-invariant denotation that is subject to combination. Word meanings in combination are not a mere list, but combine together in a unified structure. Sentences can be made up of any number of words, and whether some set of words constitutes a sentence depends on how their word meanings combine to result in a unified whole.

The larger context of this claim, in Ganganatha Jha’s English translation, can be found at archive.org. (Jha, Ganganatha. 1924. The Tantravārttika of Kumārila Bhaṭṭa, Volume 1. 2 vols. Delhi: Pilgrims Book Pvt. Ltd.)