Words as meaningful building-blocks of language
We think of words as the basic units of language. When a baby begins to
speak,It seems, then, that a word is not just a building-block of sentences: it is
a building-block with a meaning that is unpredictable, or at least suffi-
ciently unpredictable that learners of English, and even sometimes
native speakers, may need to consult a dictionary in order to discover it.
We may be tempted to think that this constitutes everything that
needs to be said about words: they are units of language which are basic
in two senses, both