Issue 43, 4th quarter 2008
Special Issue on the XXII World Congress of Philosophy
Ernie Lepore
Pages 67-71
Words don’t come easy
Most linguists think that there are infinitely many sentences, that languages are productive and systematic. Maybe the most remarkable achievement of our lives is that we learn this thing with infinite power. But the whole thing hangs on those sentences being built up out of their components, which are words. So it’s not even clear what one of the more striking theses in the development of linguistics over the last half century signifies or means without an account of the atoms, so to speak, out of which we build these things.