Compositionality or syntagmatic delimitation of lexical units is a basic principle in grammatical semantics which claims that single meanings combine

together to form more complex meanings. That is to said, we must interpret utterances from our knowledge of the meanings of simple expressions and the constructions used in combining them

The, a, has, eaten, seen, passing, contemporary, novelist, buffalo.

The novelist has seen the buffalo A novelist has eaten the buffalo A contemporary novelist has seen a buffalo The novelist has seen a passing buffalo A buffalo has eaten a passing contemporary novelist

A buen hambre no hay pan duro. A donde fueres haz lo que vieres. A otro perro con ese hueso. Ahora que hay modo. Antes que te cases mira lo que haces. Beben agua en el mismo jarrito. Caras vemos, corazones no sabemos. En caliente y de repente

Anything tastes good when you're hungry.

When in Rome do as the Romans do. You're pulling my leg. Make hay while the sun shines. Look before you leap. They're as thick as thieves. You can't judge a book by its cover. Strike while the iron's hot.

It deals with a language's lexicon, or the collection of words in a language. It is concerned with individual words

The study of how word meanings combine into phrase/sentence meanings, and the meaning relationships among these larger units.

When someone saw the red balloon, they were able to say its a red balloon. That is balloon held the semantic features of [+redness]. balloon [+redness]
NP

adj red

N balloon balloon is the head of the NP (its the final head)

large balloon

balloon [+largeness]

NP Adj Large N balloon

In all languages, VERBS play a central role in the MEANING and STRUCTURE of sentences. The verb determines:

number of objects limits the semantic properties of both its subjects and objects

Example: find requires an [+animate] subject, and selects a D.O. The dog found the bone. *The house found. Put selects [+locative] for both a D.O. and a PP. Put the bone on the table. *Put to the person.