Ferdinand de Saussure Quotes

Semantics, or the study of meaning, remained undeveloped, while phonetics made rapid progress and even came to occupy the central place in the scientific study of language.

Language is something that I take great interest in.

I have my own vocabulary. I love linguistics. That surprises people.

I am the youngest of three girls. My first linguistics book was a study of 'New York Jewish conversational style'. That was my dissertation.

Grammar is the analysis of language.

My linguistics is pretty theoretical.

I'm very sensitive to the English language. I studied the dictionary obsessively when I was a kid and collect old dictionaries. Words, I think, are very powerful and they convey an intention.

Languages are true analytical methods.

I am interested in 18th century natural philosophy, science, particularly botany, the study of hybridity in plants and animals, which, of course, then allows me to consider the hybridity of language.

Linguistics is very much a science. It's a human science, one of the human sciences. And it's one of the more interesting human sciences.

The marvelous thing is that even in studying linguistics, we find that the universe as a whole is patterned, ordered, and to some degree intelligible to us.

I know what the structure of the language is.

As Bromberger observed, rules are understood to be elements of the computational systems that determine the sound and meaning of the infinite array of expressions of a language; the information so derived is accessed by other systems in language use.

I'm telling you, I could teach at a university, [George] Carlin, a whole semester. The construction and deconstruction of the words, the language, the order.

Linguistics becomes an ever eerier area, like I feel like I'm in Oz, Just trying to tell it like it was.

I have always loved the fluidity of language - delighting in dialects, dictionaries, slang and neologisms.

A linguistic system is a series of differences of sound combined with a series of differences of ideas.

The business, task or object of the scientific study of languages will if possible be 1) to trace the history of all known languages. Naturally this is possible only to a very limited extent and for very few languages.

Intended to serve as an introduction to both the linguistic and also the practical study of spoken English.

If you decide to design your own language, there are thousands of sort of amateur language designer pitfalls.

Within speech, words are subject to a kind of relation that is independent of the first and based on their linkage: these are syntagmatic relations, of which I have spoken.

At the same time we overlap, because, I do linguistics, and Ben did a first degree in Linguistics at Lancaster University, so he knows some of my subject.

Language makes infinite use of finite media.

The integers of language are sentences, and their organs are the parts of speech. Linguistic organization, then, consists in the differentiation of the parts of speech and the integration of the sentence.

I wanted as little formal linguistic theory as I could get by with. I wanted the basic linguistic training to do a translation of the New Testament.