The study of the history of formal semantics shows that the calculation of sentence meaning has successively been carried out according to two seemingly opposed concepts: contextual and/or compositional. In choosing the logician Gottlob Frege as founder, formal linguistics inherited the notion of being contextual, an idea developed in his work Grundlagen (1884) which laid down that the meaning of an expression is always dependent on the meaning of the sentence in which it occurred. But when this semantic approach had to be joined together with formal syntaxes (which had been elaborated in order to account for natural languages), the contextual notion was abandoned in favour of a compositional one, which states that the meaning of a complex expression must be determined from the meanings of its parts and its mode of syntax-related composition. Viewed as incompatible throughout the twentieth century, these two concepts were elevated to the status of principle, thus showing the theoretical importance assigned to them by formal linguistics. Now, one of the goals of semantics stemming from the logico-mathematical paradigm is to go beyond the opposition of these two concepts by showing that they are operative only if their action is combined. The aim of this communication is to retrace the history of the transition from a contextual focus to a compositional one. To do this, we will begin by analyzing Frege’s approach and show the arguments (the primacy of judgment over concepts, the defence of psychologism) leading him to defend the contextual focus. Then, we’ll go on to examine the reasons which have motivated the theorists, like Richard Montague, to rely only on composition. This study will lead us to reflect upon the kind of function (empirical or normative ?) these two concepts provide within formal semantics. Finally, the analysis of linguistics facts (bringing into play, as anaphora, processes of meaning dependence) will allow us to understand why contemporary linguistics does its utmost to reconcile the action of these two concepts.