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In:Usage-based Perspectives on Language and Language Acquisition: In honour of Heike Behrens
Edited by Karin Madlener-Charpentier, Marjolijn H. Verspoor, Mirjam Weder and Annelies Häcki Buhofer
[Trends in Language Acquisition Research 35] 2026
► pp. 69–110

Chapter 3
What’s in a word?

Cognitive-linguistic, corpus-linguistic, neuroscientific, AI, psycholinguistic, and usage-based perspectives

Authors
 | University of Michigan
This content is being prepared for publication; it may be subject to changes.
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.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Signification
    • 2.1Shakespeare
    • 2.2Saussure
      • 2.2.1 Syntagmatic relations
      • 2.2.2 Associative relations
    • 2.3Associationism
      • 2.3.1James
      • 2.3.2Paivio: Imageability and concreteness effects
    • 2.4Cognitive psychology
    • 2.5 Symbol grounding
      • 2.5.1The Chinese room argument
      • 2.5.2The symbol grounding problem
      • 2.5.3Perceptual symbol systems
    • 2.6Psycholinguistics: Frequency and imageability
    • 2.7Embodied cognition
    • 2.8Cognitive Linguistics
    • 2.9Neuroscience and concomitant dependency
    • 2.10Signification in sum
  • 3.Lexical company
    • 3.1Corpus linguistics
    • 3.2Phraseology
    • 3.3Using corpora to investigate words and phrases
      • 3.3.1Hand
      • 3.3.2Back
      • 3.3.3Ass
    • 3.4Construction Grammar
    • 3.5Connectionism and triangulation
    • 3.6Associations and absences
    • 3.7Lexical company, AI, and LLMs
  • 4.Social usage
    • 4.1Meaning in social usage
    • 4.2Language learning from social usage
  • 5.In a WORD: The associative-cognitive CREED
  • 6.Emergence
    • 6.1Language as a Complex Adaptive System (LaCAS)
    • 6.2The units of language
    • 6.3The sources of word meaning
  • Notes
  • References
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