Meaning... is to be regarded as a complex of contextual relations, and phonetics, grammar, lexicography, and semantics each handles its own component… - John Rupert Firth

Speech is our most valuable instrument, because we can make it fit our common lives. We are not born to follow words. Words follow life. It has always been so from the very beginning. In fact, the human larynx and the shape of the passages above it have evolved in harmony with the lives our earliest ancestors lived, first in the trees, and then on the ground.

The complete meaning of a word is always contextual, and no study of meaning apart from context can be taken seriously.

Collocations are actual words in habitual company. A word in a usual collocation stares you in the face just as it is. Colligations cannot be of words as such. Colligations of grammatical categories related in a grammatical structure do not necessarily follow word divisions or even sub-divisions of words.