Introduction – A bio-bibliographical note / Chapter 1: What the use of language can achieve for two individuals and how the speakers’ utterances are built up / Chapter 2: What are words? Results of experiences and means to cope with new experiences — Spoken and written word form — Degrees of definiteness of the meaning sides — Words as mere components in higher syntactic units [The author selects "as text to be analysed in this chapter one page taken from the small notebook which Goethe, then 25 years old, brought along on his first Swiss journey of 1775. The notebook, with its notes and sketches very casually jotted down, was still in Goethe’s possession when he was working on parts of “Dichtung und Wahrheit”, in his old age. He used this notebook as a testimony of his mental attitude and of his world at that time – in his own words as “extremely valuable” for him. And what concerns the present book, this notebook of Goethe’s has a similar quality as the play of Hofmannsthal analysed in chapter 1. It automatically leads to a linguistic as well as a literary analysis, and it allows us to direct our attention also to the role of the written word and writing in general, in addition to the oral speech dealt with so far."] / Chapter 3: Creation of words in modern times — Learning new words at adult age — How children learn to read and to write / Chapter 4: Origin and growth of language competence in early childhood, from first non-verbal communication to sequences of fully organised finite clauses / Chapter 5: Crucial for understanding: reference, to a "world" or inside the text — Irony and other rhetorical figures — Metaphors, utilising existing words for new meaning sides — Motivated word forms / Chapter 6: Grammar I — Grammar as a system which permits to produce regular variants of words and to combine word forms to clauses with predictable global meaning / Chapter 7: Grammar II — Complex sentences, morphosyntactic structures and semantic relations in higher units of speaking, embedding of the text as a whole and of each of its parts in a pragmatic context / Chapter 8: How old are our words, meaning sides and word forms, and our grammatical categories and patterns? Great changes and yet very often remarkable stability / Chapter 9: Truth or lack of truth in texts — How to decide whether true or not — Fiction as a macroclass of texts, appropriate use of fictional texts / Concluding Chapter: Ideal language and real language – as seen by an author of fictional texts (Das Glasperlenspiel / The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse) / Subject Index / Words looked at in some detail / Bibliography