ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how deeply prototype semantics (PS) troubles the waters of structuralist linguistics, in particular whether it risks scuppering the thesis of the autonomy of grammatical structure. It offers grounding of the prototype phenomenon which shows, on the basis of ontology of language and apart from observation of the fact, that people a priori ought to expect words to be vague. The change of meaning in vague words is understandable if we ascribe to change, to semantic change and change in general, the structure of a holistic-evolutionary process in which the form of change is not separable from its content. An idea launched by Wittgenstein and still treated with awe by many philosophers in the analytical tradition is that to possess a concept is to know the meaning of a word, and to know the meaning of a word is to have mastered some set of linguistic rules prescribed by the speech community.
