But it's obviously untrue to say that words can only have one meaning without syntax. Children don't suddenly go from cooing to full sentences immediately, but they pass through a number of stages, one of which is the one word stage. In this stage the parents can get a grip on what the child wants a lot of times, even though the child is completely lacking in syntax. For example, the child can say "up!" and have it interpreted a number of different ways in different contexts, from wanting to be picked up, to pointing at something high in order to bring it to the attention of the parents, to wanting the parent to play with the child by throwing a ball into the air. You have it backwards, as another poster pointed out. You can have meaning without syntax, but the variety of things you can coherently communicate to someone is increased with syntax. And likewise, you can have syntax without meaning, as long as each word fits grammatically into the sentence. And furthermore, semantics and syntax can be divorced from phonological representations -- we're doing it right now on this page.