> I've met some really really brilliant people who've been banging their head against that particular wall since the 1980s.
The idea of breaking meaning into an inventory of discrete components like this is at least as old as Hjelmslev, I think even Saussure touches on it.
Part of it seems to me to be that you're breaking down words into words. Even if you write it in uppercase and call it a primitive, you don't have to spend too much time on cognitive linguistics to know that there's really nothing primitive about MAN or MONARCH...
At that point, you do need some sort of grounding, e.g. a human reading the text, or a neural network embedded in a robot. It isn't symbols all the way down.
The idea of breaking meaning into an inventory of discrete components like this is at least as old as Hjelmslev, I think even Saussure touches on it.
Part of it seems to me to be that you're breaking down words into words. Even if you write it in uppercase and call it a primitive, you don't have to spend too much time on cognitive linguistics to know that there's really nothing primitive about MAN or MONARCH...