One of the most appealing aspects of so-called distributional semantic models (see Turney and Pantel (2010) for a recent overview) is that they afford some hope for a non-trivial, computationally tractable treatment of the context dependence of lexical meaning that might also approximate in interesting ways the psychological representation of that meaning (Andrews et al., 2009).
in order to have a complete theory of natural language meaning, these models must be supplied with or connected to a compositional semantics; otherwise, we will have no account of the recursive potential that natural language affords for the construction of novel complex contents.