In thedomain of language, the word undergoes, more or less at the same period, an analogous transformation: needless to say, it does not cease to have a meaning and to be able to 'represent' something in the mind that employs or understands it; but this role is no longer constitutive of the word in its very being, in its essential architecture, in what enables it to take its place within a sentence and to link itself there with other more or less different words.