I’m… just surprised it’s not all absolutely obvious and needs clarification. Maybe I’m missing something?
Of course we learn the meaning of a lot of words as children, from other people, and from other experiences, how else!
Of course we build up on the basics by relying on the words we already know, as well as on our experiences outside language.
Of course the meaning of words is contextual and depends on how we happened to learn them, and so is different for different people, groups, etc. It also changes when a person’s context or environment changes.
Of course we think partly in words, partly in formless blobs, partly in images, and who knows how else. Of course different people have different mixes of all of the above, or even the same people in different circumstances.
Of course we don’t naturally notice most of the above without actually thinking about it for a time.
The fact that it seems obvious is good. But people get pretty tripped up about this stuff. You don’t have to go very far in the literature on linguistics and languages to find all sorts of confusion about how words get their meaning. Some of this is because there people are worried about various edge cases and trying to explore the idea space, but there’s lots of folks who take seriously the idea that words can get all their meaning from definitions, and it took some serious effort to show that this doesn’t work. So this chapter is mostly to help people notice confusion and unlearn what they thought they knew about how words mean things in order to point them towards how it actually works.
Ah, yeah, that makes sense. People tend to get attached to simple and wrong ideas like that. I mean, it’s reasonably accurate to say “some words sometimes get some of their meaning from definitions, but it’s far from universal”, but not “all words get all their meaning from definitions only”.
I’m… just surprised it’s not all absolutely obvious and needs clarification. Maybe I’m missing something?
Of course we learn the meaning of a lot of words as children, from other people, and from other experiences, how else!
Of course we build up on the basics by relying on the words we already know, as well as on our experiences outside language.
Of course the meaning of words is contextual and depends on how we happened to learn them, and so is different for different people, groups, etc. It also changes when a person’s context or environment changes.
Of course we think partly in words, partly in formless blobs, partly in images, and who knows how else. Of course different people have different mixes of all of the above, or even the same people in different circumstances.
Of course we don’t naturally notice most of the above without actually thinking about it for a time.
The fact that it seems obvious is good. But people get pretty tripped up about this stuff. You don’t have to go very far in the literature on linguistics and languages to find all sorts of confusion about how words get their meaning. Some of this is because there people are worried about various edge cases and trying to explore the idea space, but there’s lots of folks who take seriously the idea that words can get all their meaning from definitions, and it took some serious effort to show that this doesn’t work. So this chapter is mostly to help people notice confusion and unlearn what they thought they knew about how words mean things in order to point them towards how it actually works.
Ah, yeah, that makes sense. People tend to get attached to simple and wrong ideas like that. I mean, it’s reasonably accurate to say “some words sometimes get some of their meaning from definitions, but it’s far from universal”, but not “all words get all their meaning from definitions only”.