Syntax
The principle of double articulation has enabled human beings to create languages
with an impressively large number of signs, but the inventory of signs in a language is
by necessity finite. Since the number of sounds in a language usually is between 10
and 100, we could not have hundreds of thousands of different signs unless we
allowed them to be extremely long, and there is anyway an upper limit to the numberof signs that a human being is able to remember. It would not be very practical for a
language to have separate signs for meanings like ‘man killed lion’ and ‘lion killed
man’. The total number of isolated signs in a human language is generally limited to
roughly 10 000–20 000, and with this number of signs we cannot talk about an
infinite number of meanings – unless we combine them.