But the popular view cannot be right, because (as linguist Paul Postal has observed) membership in the word stock of a natural language is open. Consider this example: “GM's new Zabundra makes even the massive Ford Expedition look economical.” If English had an antecedently given set of words, then this expression would not be an English sentence at all, because 'Zabundra' is not a word (we just invented it). Yet the sentence is not just grammatical English, it is readily interpretable (it clearly implies that the Zabundra is a large, fuel-hungry sports utility vehicle produced by General Motors). Similar points could be made regarding word borrowing, personal names, scientific nomenclature, onomatopoeisis, acronyms, loaned words, and so on; English is not a fixed set of words.

The syntactic structure of natural languages has several important features. One is revealed by the example just considered; there is no guarantee of what mathematical logicians call 'unique readability' — there is no one-to-one correspondence between sound strings and syntactic structures, or between syntactic structures and meanings. Natural languages are replete with ambiguity.

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