 The claim that L is compositional is often taken to mean that the meaning of an arbitrary complex expression in L is built up from the meanings of its constituents in L—call this the building principle for L. This is a fairly strong claim, at least if we take the building metaphor seriously. For then the meanings of complex expressions must themselves be complex entities whose structure mirrors that of the sentence; cf. Frege (1892, 1919). This presumably entails but is not entailed by local distributive cross-linguistic compositionality of meaning.