Words as meaningful building-blocks of language
We think of words as the basic units of language. When a baby begins to
speak,
However, if that were all that needed to be said, this would be a very
short book – much shorter than it actually is! So in what respects do 1.
and 2. jointly fall short as a characterisation of words and their behaviour?
A large part of the answer lies in the fact that there are units of
language that have characteristic 1. but not 2., and vice versa. Sections 2.3
and 2.4 are devoted to demonstrating this. First, though, we will deal in
Section 2.2 with a distinction which, though important, is independent
of the distinctions that apply to words in particular.