Counting Words

As we have seen in Chapters 2 to 7, language has a fabulous, partly-visible, and partly-hidden structure, and still a lot remains to be discovered. Up to now, our study has been qualitative: in second articulation, when meaning emerges out of phonemes or graphemes, meaning is a quality of the morpheme. Part-of-speech tags, belonging to a constituent, etc., are part of the qualitative information we can gather on morphemes, words, or word groups, and we obtain it by doing tests and answering questions.