Words as meaningful building-blocks of language
We think of words as the basic units of language. When a baby begins to
speak, the way the excited mother reports what has happened is: ‘Sally
(or Tommy) has said her (or his) first word!’ We would be surprised at
a mother who described little Tommy’s or Sally’s first utterance as a
sentence. Sentences come later, we are inclined to feel, when words are
strung together meaningfully. That is not to say that a sentence must
always consist of more than one word