Semantic Representation Quotes

In a logically perfect language, there will be one word and no more for every simple object, and everything that is not simple will be expressed by a combination of words, by a combination derived, of course, from the words for the simple things that enter in, one word for each simple component.

The world is MADE up of language. We can SAY that the world is composed of little demons doing calisthenics, each one the size of a pissant's eyebrow.... Or we can SAY the world is made of tiny wave mechanical packets of matter hurling through space at near the speed of light.... But notice that what we get each time are WORDS.

According to scholars of linguistics, the relation between a word and its meaning is arbitrary.

Words were medicine; they were magic and invisible. They came from nothing into sound and meaning. They were beyond price; they could neither be bought nor sold.

Words are illusions.

Uncritical semantics is the myth of a museum in which the exhibits are meanings and the words are labels. To switch languages is to change the labels.

Where our language suggests a body and there is none: there, we should like to say, is a spirit.

English words are like prisms. Empty, nothing inside, and still they make rainbows.

Words, in their primary or immediate signification, stand for nothing but the ideas in the mind of him who uses them.