What’s in a word?

Abstract How do words mean? Scholars have historically taken different views. Shakespeare (1597) and de Saussure (1916) emphasized signification ; Firth (1957) “you shall know a word by the company it keeps”; and Wittgenstein (1953) “in most cases meaning is use”. These maxims have influenced major contemporary research areas — signification imbues structuralism, semiotics, cognitive linguistics, psycholinguistics, embodied (4E) cognition, and neuroscience; lexical company inspires corpus linguistics, computer science, and artificial intelligence (AI); and usage-based approaches relate everyday social use to language acquisition and pedagogy. This chapter examines the historical and logical lineages of these ideas. Language is a complex adaptive system involving many types of agents — words and meanings, speeches and texts, speakers and social groups, cultures and customs. In language learning, signification, lexical company, and social usage are separable but symbiotic sources to meaning. In words, these sources of information are fused together. And who has done the fusing? You. You contain multitudes. You are a strange loop, an agentive self-referential hierarchical conscious system, who has hosted and dynamically merged these three complementary streams of information over the course of your lifetime, from before your first word, probably some version of mother , to now. This chapter reviews how.