Abstract
The title of the present paper, “How people use words to making meanings”, carries with it a number of theoretical assumptions, some of which are more controversial than others. It is, I suppose, uncontroversial that language, used fully and meaningfully, is a uniquely human phenomenon, and that the communications and thought processes of other animals, even chimpanzees, are different in kind from human language.
It is people who use words. Language does not exist in a vacuum: it exists in the brains and the interactions of humans.
Humans are social animals, and language is the instrument of their sociability, as well as the vehicle of their thought processes. Equally uncontroversial is the assumption that language is composed of words, put together into some sort of structure, which has persistent attributes.
By a “persistent attribute” I mean features like the rank scale of grammar – discourse (document or conversation), paragraph, sentence, clause, phrase or group, word, morpheme). Such structures