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”.
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”.