...

"The seeds of your confusion are very evident from your message".

The seeds of your unsubstantiated assumptions about me are very evident from yours.

OK Michael, I can see I'm not helping. I'll stop. On NLP (a topic on which I have some expertise), I'll save you time in your search: Haskell is not suitable. Use a NLP tool. Programming languages and their semantics are so unlike natural languages as to be useless. I found your "primer for the lexical semanticist" to be full of strained and unhelpful analogies. I was surprised it omitted mention of Montague Grammar -- which draws from Lambda calculus/Combinators, and would be the obvious go-to _if_ Haskell were to be applicable. On unsubstantiated assumptions:

I started programming at 15.

Me too. (Dartmouth BASIC on a teletype over a dial-up line to a timeshare service.)

It's been a very rare year, even after leaving the software profession, when I didn't write at least some code, learning new things in the process.

Me ditto.

Which means I've been looking at programming languages and how to implement things at the most appropriate level of abstraction possible for just a few months shy of fifty years.

For me, a few months over fifty years. (BTW nothing you've said persuades me away from recommending the best way to learn Haskell is via Lambda-calculus.) AntC