Daniel Casasanto, professor of psychology and human development, argues that “meaning is a dynamic pattern of information that is made active transiently, as needed, in response to internally-generated or external cues.”
Words do not have “core meanings” because their usage is flexible and subject to context-dependent nuances. The context around a word cues a specific pattern of neuro-cognitive activity that produces to our understanding of the word—the contextual meaning of a word is physically reflected in the brain! Language learning, which involves arbitrary connections between symbols and meanings, is an example of our capacity for flexible cognition.
Experiments using transcranial magnetic stimulation have shown that impairing motor regions impairs understanding of relevant words, suggesting that meaning is related to embodied actions.