Some ideas about language

1. Speech and text understanding are dynamic- meaning changes during reading/listening and is not a function of the whole.
2. Language works because of a shared world, not because of its internal structure (which is nearly arbitrary). 
3. The key cognitive capabilities are (a) naming; and (b) deriving word types from narrative. [over both the external world and the internal one]
Update: If best models come into this, it is in describing how we maintain multiple possible meanings, and resolve them by reading more words (i.e. making "additional measurements")