ABSTRACT
Many scientists can trace a lifelong interest in a problem to the writings of a single author encountered as a student. For me the author was George Miller, and I encountered him through his papers “Some Preliminaries to Psycholinguistics” (Miller, 1965) and “The Psycholinguists” (Miller, 1967). The first of these papers presented a list — seven items long, of course — of “preliminary admonitions to anyone contemplating language as a potential subject for his psychological ratiocinations” (pp. 17–18):
Not all physical features of speech are significant for vocal communication, and not all significant features of speech have a physical realization.
The meaning of an utterance should not be confused with its reference.
The meaning of an utterance is not a linear sum of the meanings of the words that comprise it.
The syntactic structure of a sentence imposes groupings that govern the interactions between the meanings of the words in that sentence.
There is no limit to the number of sentences or the number of meanings that can be expressed.
A description of a language and a description of a language user must be kept distinct.
There is a large biological component to the human capacity for articulate speech.
