> For the English monolinguals reading this, imagine studying English and stumbling upon the sentence "I fell for her", except that you only know the literal meaning of the verb "to fall" so while you understand the words in isolation the sentence remains completely opaque and meaningless to you.
This isn't a great example; from a dictionary perspective there are three words in the sentence "I fell for her", being "I", "fell for", and "her". Trying to analyze it as the four words "I", "fell", "for", and "her" is doomed to failure[1], because two of those words aren't even present. But if you did know all the words in isolation, you'd have no trouble with the sentence; nothing tricky is going on.
(The four-word analysis actually does work, but it would be an unusual reading, with "for her" being a benefactive construction analogous to "I wrote a song for her".)
[1] You can get a sense of why this analysis can't succeed by trying to relate "her" as used in the sentence to any standard sense of the preposition "for". ( https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/for#Preposition ). None of them work.
This isn't a great example; from a dictionary perspective there are three words in the sentence "I fell for her", being "I", "fell for", and "her". Trying to analyze it as the four words "I", "fell", "for", and "her" is doomed to failure[1], because two of those words aren't even present. But if you did know all the words in isolation, you'd have no trouble with the sentence; nothing tricky is going on.
(The four-word analysis actually does work, but it would be an unusual reading, with "for her" being a benefactive construction analogous to "I wrote a song for her".)
[1] You can get a sense of why this analysis can't succeed by trying to relate "her" as used in the sentence to any standard sense of the preposition "for". ( https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/for#Preposition ). None of them work.