Why Does a Word Mean?
Considerations on why we use t-r-e-e to mean “tree”. The world isn’t real without language, but also there isn’t language without the world.
A word is, as defined by linguistics, the minimum unit that carries semantic meaning. To put it differently, we could also say it’s a sequence of letters, each of them associated with a corresponding phoneme, that expresses meaning that can be recognised by those engaged in communication.
At this point, however, it would be interesting to pose the question of what is meaning. How and why does a certain word come to represent reality with a particular sequence of letters and not others? Why does “tree” represent an element that has a trunk and leaves and roots into the ground, and not something else?
We can begin to answer this question by saying that language is a convention that is acquired through learning. Every human language follows a set of rules that have been and are continually established and negotiated by speakers.
Ferdinand di Saussure’s Structuralism can help us understand a little bit better how this relationship between language and the world functions. He was one of the first linguists to ever study language as a social construct, and not merely as an abstract, fixed system. He drew…
