Word Meaning and Value

The previous chapter suggested the possibility that linguistic units that are atomically inseparable, such as words, partly derive from statistical universals of language. Harris’s hypothesis, however, only indicates how words are acquired and does not say anything about their meanings. Thus far, this book has not considered the notion of meaning at all, and the question of what is meaning is one of the most difficult in human history. It nevertheless seems that when we hear a sequence of words, we apprehend an image of its meaning. Hence, this chapter considers how the statistical universals could contribute to the meanings of words.